Strictly business; more stories of the four million

/

Ex ICthrtB

SEYMOUR DURST

-f ' 'Tort nUwv ^im/ierja-m. of Je Hanhatarus

When you leave, pkase leave this hook

Because it has heen said
"£ver' thing comes t' him who waits

Except a loaned hook."

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Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library
Gift of Seymour B. Durst Old York Library

Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2013

http://archive.org/details/strictlybusinessOOhenr_0

STRICTLY BUSINESS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

$

Roads of Destiny, Cabbages and Kings, The Four

Million, The Trimmed Lamp, Heart oj the

West, The Voice oJ the City, The

Gentle Grafter, Options

STRICTLY BUSINESS

MORE STORIES OF THE
FOUR MILLION

BY

O. HENRY

NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

MCMX

5%

a

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
PUBLISHED, MARCH, IQIO

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

PA.GK

I.

Strictly Business 3

11.

The Gold that Glittered

21

III.

Babes in the Jungle

34

IV.

The Day Resurgent

43

V.

The Fifth Wheel

53

VI.

The Poet and the Peasant

72

VII.

The Robe of Peace .

82

VIII.

The Girl and the Graft .

89

IX.

The Call of the Tame

99

X.

The Unknown Quantity .

108

XI.

The Thing's the Play

117

XII.

A Ramble in Aphasia .

. 129

XIII.

A Municipal Report .

. 147

XIV.

Psyche and the Pskyscraper

172

XV.

A Bird of Bagdad

182

XVI.

Compliments of the Season

194

VI

Contents

CHAPTER

PAQS

XVII.

A Night in New Arabia

. . 209

XVIII.

The Girl and the Habit

. . 231

XIX.

Proof of the Pudding .

. . 240

XX.

Past One at Rooney's .

. . 255

XXI.

The Venturers

. . 276

XXII.

The Duel

. . 294

XXIII.

"What You Want" . .

. . 302

STRICTLY BUSINESS

STRICTLY BUSINESS

I SUPPOSE you know all about the stage and stage
people. You've been touched with and by actors,
and you read the newspaper criticisms and the jokes in
the weeklies about the Rialto and the chorus girls and the
long-haired tragedians. And I suppose that a condensed
list of your ideas about the mysterious stageland would
boil down to something like this :

Leading ladies have five husbands, paste diamonds,
and figures no better than your own (madam) if they
weren't padded. Chorus girls are inseparable from
peroxide, Panhards and Pittsburg. All shows walk
back to New York on tan oxford and railroad ties. Irre-
proachable actresses reserve the comic-landlady part for
their mothers on Broadway and their step-aunts on the
road. Kyrle Bellew's real name is Boyle O'Kelley.
The ravings of John McCullough in the phonograph were
stolen from the first sale of the Ellen Terry memoirs. Joe
Weber is funnier than E. H. Sothern; but Henry Miller
is getting older than he was.

All theatrical people on leaving the theatre at night

8

4 Strictly Business

drink champagne and eat lobsters until noon the next
day. After all, the moving pictures have got the whole
bunch pounded to a pulp.

Now, few of us know the real life of the stage people.
If we did, the profession might be more overcrowded
than it is. We look askance at the players with an eye
full of patronizing superiority — and we go home and
practise all sorts of elocution and gestures in front of our
looking glasses.

Latterly there has been much talk of the actor people
in a new light. It seems to have been divulged that
instead of being motoring bacchanalians and diamond-
hungry loreleis they are businesslike folk, students and
ascetics with childer and homes and libraries, owning
real estate, and conducting their private affairs in as
orderly and unsensational a manner as any of us good
citizens who are bound to the chariot wheels of the gas,
rent, coal, ice, and wardmen.

Whether the old or the new report of the sock-and-
buskiners be the true one is a surmise that has no
place here. I offer you merely this little story of two
strollers; and for proof of its truth I can show you
only the dark patch above the cast-iron handle of the
stage-entrance door of Keetor's old vaudeville theatre
made there by the petulant push of gloved hands too
impatient to finger the clumsy thumb-latch — and where
I last saw Cherry whisking through like a swallow

Strictly Business 5

into her nest, on time to the minute, as usual, to dress
for her act.

The vaudeville team of Hart & Cherry was an inspira-
tion. Bob Hart had been roaming through the Eastern
and Western circuits for four years with a mixed-up act
comprising a monologue, three lightning changes with
songs, a couple of imitations of celebrated imitators, and a
buck-and-wing dance that had drawn a glance of approval
from the bass-viol player in more than one house — than
which no performer ever received more satisfactory
evidence of good work.

The greatest treat an actor can have is to witness the
pitiful performance with which all other actors desecrate
the stage. In order to give himself this pleasure he will
often forsake the sunniest Broadway corner between
Thirty-fourth and Forty-fourth to attend a matinee offer-
ing by his less gifted brothers. Once during the lifetime
of a minstrel joke one comes to scoff and remains to go
through with that most difficult exercise of Thespian
muscles — the audible contact of the palm of one hand
against the palm of the other.

One afternoon Bob Hart presented his solvent, serious,
well-known vaudevillian face at the box-office window
of a rival attraction and got his d. h. coupon for an
orchestra seat.

A, B, C, and D glowed successively on the announce-
ment spaces and passed into oblivion, each plunging Mr.

6 Strictly Business

Hart deeper into gloom. Others of the audience shrieked,
squirmed, whistled and applauded; but Bob Hart, "All
the Mustard and a Whole Show in Himself," sat with his
face as long and his hands as far apart as a boy holding a
hank of yarn for his grandmother to wind into a ball.

But when H came on, "The Mustard" suddenly sat
up straight. H was the happy alphabetical prognosticator
of Winona Cherry, in Character Songs and Impersonations.
There were scarcely more than two bites to Cherry; but
she delivered the merchandise tied with a pink cord and
charged to the old man's account. She first showed you
a deliciously dewy and ginghamy country girl with a
basket of property daisies who informed you ingenuously
that there were other things to be learned at the old log
school -house besides cipherin' and nouns, especially
"When the Teach-er Kept Me in." Vanishing, with a
quick flirt of gingham apron-strings, she reappeared in
considerably less than a " trice " as a fluffy " Parisienne "
— so near does Art bring the old red mill to the Moulin
Rouge. And then

But you know the rest. And so did Bob Hart; but
he saw somebody else. He thought he saw that Cherry
was the only professional on the short order stage that he
had seen who seemed exactly to fit the part of "Helen
Grimes" in the sketch he had written and kept tucked
away in the tray of his trunk. Of course Bob Hart, as
well as every other normal actor, grocer, newspaper man,

Strictly Business 7

professor, curb broker, and farmer, has a play tucked
away somewhere. They tuck 'em in trays of trunks,
trunks of trees, desks, haymows, pigeonholes, inside
pockets, safe-deposit vaults, handboxes, and coal cellars,
waiting for Mr. Frohman to call. They belong among
the fifty-seven different kinds.

But Bob Hart's sketch was not destined to end in a
pickle jar. He called it "Mice Will Play." He had
kept it quiet and hidden away ever since he wrote it,
waiting to find a partner who fitted his conception oi
"Helen Grimes." And here was "Helen" herself, with
all the innocent abandon, the youth, the sprightliness, and
the flawless stage art that his critical taste demanded.

After the act was over Hart found the manager in the
box office, and got Cherry's address. At five the next
afternoon he called at the musty old house in the West
Forties and sent up his professional card.

By daylight, in a secular shirtwaist and plain voile
skirt, with her hair curbed and her Sister of Charity eyes,
Winona Cherry might have been playing the part of
Prudence Wise, the deacon's daughter, in the great
(unwritten) New England drama not yet entitled anything.

"I know your act, Mr. Hart," she said after she had
looked over his card carefully. "What did you wish to
see me about ? "

" I saw you work last night," said Hart. " I've written
a sketch that I've been saving up. It's for two; and I

8 Strictly Business

think you can do the other part. I thought I*d see you
about it."

"Come in the parlor," said Miss Cherry. "IVe been
wishing for something of the sort. I think I'd hke to act
instead of doing turns."

Bob Hart drew his cherished "Mice Will Play" from
his pocket, and read it to her.

"Read it again, please," said Miss Cherry.

And then she pointed out to him clearly how it could
be improved by introducing a messenger instead of a
telephone call, and cutting the dialogue just before the
climax while they were struggling for the pistol, and by
completely changing the lines and business of Helen
Grimes at the point where her jealousy overcomes her.
Hart yielded to all her strictures without argument. She
had at once put her finger on the sketch's weaker points.
That was her woman's intuition that he had lacked. A\
the end of their talk Hart was willing to stake the judg-
ment, experience, and savings of his four years of vaude-
ville that " Mice Will Play " would blossom into a perennial
flower in the garden of the circuits. Miss Cherry was
slower to decide. After many puckerings of her smooth
young brow and tappings on her small, white teeth with
the end of a lead pencil she gave out her dictum.

"Mr. Hart," said she, "I believe your sketch is going
to win out. That Grimes part fits me like a shrinkable
flannel after its first trip to a handless hand laundry. I

Strictly Business 9

can make it stand out like the colonel of the Forty-fourth
Regiment at a Little Mothers' Bazaar. And I've seen
you work. I know what you can do with the other part.
But business is business. How much do you get a week
for the stunt you do now?"

"Two hundred," answered Hart.

"I get one hundred for mine," said Cherry. "That's
about the natural discount for a woman. But I live on
it and put a few simoleons every week under the loose
brick in the old kitchen hearth. The stage is all right.
I love it; but there's something else I love better — that's
a little country home, some day, with Plymouth Rock
chickens and six ducks wandering around the yard.

" Now, let me tell you, Mr. Hart, I am strictly busi-
ness. If you want me to play the opposite part in your
sketch, I'll do it. And I believe we can make it go. And
there's something else I want to say: There's no non-
sense in my make-up; I'm on the level, and I'm on the
stage for what it pays me, just as other girls work in stores
and offices. I'm going to save my money to keep me
when I'm past doing my stunts. No Old Ladies' Home
or Retreat for Imprudent Actresses for me.

" If you want to make this a business partnership, Mr.
Hart, with all nonsense cut out of it, I'm in on it. I know
something about vaudeville teams in general; but this
would have to be one in particular. I want you to know
that I'm on the stage for what I can cart away from it

10 Strictly Business

every pay-day in a little manila envelope with nicotine
stains on it, where the cashier has licked the flap. It's
kind of a hobby of mine to want to cravenette myself for
plenty of rainy days in the future. I want you to know
just how I am. I don't know what an all-night restaurant
looks like; I drink only weak tea; I never spoke to a man
at a stage entrance in my life, and I've got money in five
savings banks."

**Miss Cherry," said Bob Hart in his smooth, serious
tones, *' you're in on your own terms. I've got 'strictly
business' pasted in my hat and stenciled on my make-up
box. When I dream of nights I always see a five-room
bungalow on the north shore of Long Island, with a Jap
cooking clam broth and duckling in the kitchen, and me
with the title deeds to the place in my pongee coat pocket,
swinging in a hammock on the side porch, reading Stan-
ley's * Explorations into Africa.' And nobody else
around. You never was interested in Africa, was you.
Miss Cherry?"

**Not any," said Cherry. "What I'm going to do
with my money is to bank it. You can get four per cent,
on deposits. Even at the salary I've been earning, I've
figured out that in ten years I'd have an income of about
$50 a month just from the interest alone. Well, I might
invest some of the principal in a little business — say,
trimming hats or a beauty parlor, and make more."

" Well," said Hart, "you've got the proper idea all right.

Strictly Business 11

all right, anyhow. There are mighty few actors that
amount to anything at all who couldn't fix themselves for
the wet days to come if they'd save their money instead of
blowing it. I'm glad you've got the correct business idea
of it, Miss Cherry. I think the same way; and I believe
this sketch will more than double what both of us earn
now when we get it shaped up."

The subsequent history of "Mice Will Play" is the
history of all successful writings for the stage. Hart &
Cherry cut it, pieced it, remodeled it, performed surgical
operations on the dialogue and business, changed the
lines, restored 'em, added more, cut 'em out, renamed
it, gave it back the old name, rewrote it, substituted
a dagger for the pistol, restored the pistol — put the sketch
through all the known processes of condensation and
improvement.

They rehearsed it by the old-fashioned boarding-house
clock in the rarely used parlor until its warning click at
five minutes to the hour would occur every time exactly half
a second before the click of the unloaded revolver that
Helen Grimes used in rehearsing the thrilling climax
of the sketch.

Yes, that was a thriller and a piece of excellent work.
In the act a real 32-caliber revolver was used loaded with
a real cartridge. Helen Grimes, who is a Western girl of
decidedly Buffalo Billish skill and daring, is tempestuously
in love with Frank Desmond, the private secretary and

12 Strictly Business

confidential prospective son-in-law of her father, "Arap-
ahoe" Grimes, quarter-million-dollar cattle king, own-
ing a ranch that, judging by the scenery, is in either the
Bad Lands or Amagansett, L. I. Desmond (in private
life Mr. Bob Hart) wears puttees and Meadow Brook
Hunt riding trousers, and gives his address as New York,
leaving you to wonder why he comes to the Bad Lands or
Amagansett (as the case may be) and at the same time to
conjecture mildly why a cattleman should want puttees
about his ranch with a secretary in 'em.

Well, anyhow, you know as well as I do that we all like
that kind of play, whether we admit it or not — something
along in between "Bluebeard, Jr.," and "Cymbeline"
played in the Russian.

There were only two parts and a half in "Mice Will
Play." Hart and Cherry were the two, of course; and
the half was a minor part always played by a stage hand,
who merely came in once in a Tuxedo coat and a panic
to announce that the house was surrounded by Indians,
and to turn down the gas fire in the grate by the mana-
ger's orders.

There was another girl in the sketch — a Fifth Avenue
society swelless — who was visiting the ranch and who
had sirened Jack Valentine when he was a wealthy club-
man on lower Third Avenue before he lost his money.
This girl appeared on the stage only in the photographic
state — Jack had her Sarony stuck up on the mantel of

Strictly Business 13

the Amagan — of the Bad Lands droring room. Helen
was jealous, of course.

And now for the thriller. Old "Arapahoe" Grimes
dies of angina pectoris one night — so Helen informs us
in a stage-ferryboat whisper over the footlights — while
only his secretary was present. And that same day he
was known to have had $647,000 in cash in his (ranch)
library just received for the sale of a drove of beeves in
the East (that accounts for the prices we pay for steak!).
The cash disappears at the same time. Jack Valentine
was the only person with the ranchman when he made
his (alleged) croak.

" Gawd knows I love him ; but if he has done this deed

" you sabe, don't you ? And then there are some

mean things said about the Fifth Avenue Girl — who
doesn't come on the stage — and can we blame her, with
the vaudeville trust holding down prices until one actually
must be buttoned in the back by a call boy, maids cost
so much?

But, wait. Here's the climax. Helen Grimes, chapar-
ralish as she can be, is goaded beyond imprudence. She
convinces herself that Jack Valentine is not only a falsetto,
but a financier. To lose at one fell swoop $647,000 and
a lover in riding trousers with angles in the sides like the
variations on the chart of a typhoid -fever patient is enough
to make any perfect lady mad. So, then!

They stand in the (ranch) library, which is furnished

14 Strictly Business

with mounted elk heads (didn't the Elks have a fish fry
in Amagansett once?), and the denouement begins. I
know of no more interesting time in the run of a play unless
it be when the prologue ends.

Helen thinks Jack has taken the money. Who else
was there to take it ? The box-office manager was at the
front on his job; the orchestra hadn't left their seats;
and no man could get past "Old Jimmy," the stage door-
man, unless he could show a Skye terrier or an automo-
bile as a guarantee of eligibility.

Goaded beyond imprudence (as before said), Helen
says to Jack Valentine : " Robber and thief — and worse
yet, stealer of trusting hearts, this should be your fate ! "

With that out she whips, of course, the trusty 32-caliber.

"But I will be merciful," goes on Helen. "You shall
live — that will be your punishment. I will show you
how easily I could have sent you to the death that you
deserve. There is her picture on the mantel. I will send
through her more beautiful face the bullet that should
have pierced your craven heart."

And she does it. And there's no fake blank cartridges
or assistants pulling strings. Helen fires. The bullet —
the actual bullet — goes through the face of the photo-
graph — and then strikes the hidden spring of the sliding
panel in the wall — and lo ! the panel slides, and there is
the missing $647,000 in convincing stacks of currency and
bags of gold. It's great. You know how it is. Cherry

Strictly Business 15

practised for two months at a target on the roof of her
boarding house. It took good shooting. In the sketch
she had to hit a brass disk only three inches in diameter,
covered by wall paper in the panel; and she had to stand
in exactly the same spot every night, and the photo had
to be in exactly the same spot, and she had to shoot steady
and true every time.

Of course old " Arapahoe " had tucked the funds away
there in the secret place; and, of course. Jack hadn't
taken anything except his salary (which really might have
come under the head of "obtaining money under"; but
that is neither here nor there); and, of course, the New
York girl was really engaged to a concrete house contractor
in the Bronx; and, necessarily. Jack and Helen ended
in a half -Nelson — and there you are.

After Hart and Cherry had gotten "Mice Will Play"
flawless, they had a try-out at a vaudeville house that
accommodates. The sketch was a house wrecker. It
was one of those rare strokes of talent that inundates a
theatre from the roof down. The gallery wept; and the
orchestra seats, being dressed for it, swam in tears.

After the show the booking agents signed blank checks
and pressed fountain pens upon Hart and Cherry. Five
hundred dollars a week was what it panned out.

That night at 11.30 Bob Hart took off his hat and bade
Cherry good night at her boarding-house door.

"Mr. Hart," said she thoughtfully, "come inside just

16 Strictly Business

a few minutes. We've got our chance now to make good
and to make money. What we want to do is to cut
expenses every cent we can, and save all we can."

"Right," said Bob. "It's business with me. You've
got your scheme for banking yours; and I dream every
night of that bungalow with the Jap cook and nobody
around to raise trouble. Anything to enlarge the net
receipts will engage my attention."

"Come inside just a few minutes," repeated Cherry,
deeply thoughtful. "I've got a proposition to make to
you that will reduce our expenses a lot and help you work
out your own future and help me work out mine — and
all on business principles.'*

"Mice Will Play" had a tremendously successful run
in New York for ten weeks — rather neat for a vaude-
ville sketch — and then it started on the circuits. With-
out following it, it may be said that it was a solid drawing
card for two years without a sign of abated popularity.

Sam Packard, manager of one of Keetor's New York
houses, said of Hart & Cherry:

"As square and high-toned a little team as ever
came over the circuit. It's a pleasure to read their
names on the booking list. Quiet, hard workers, no
Johnny and Mabel nonsense, on the job to the minute,
straight home after their act, and each of 'em as gen-
tlemanlike as a lady. I don't expect to handle any

Strictly Business 17

attractions that give me less trouble or more respect
for the profession."

And now, after so much cracking of a nutshell, here
is the kernel of the story:

At the end of its second season " Mice Will Play " came
back to New York for another run at the roof gardens
and summer theatres. There was never any trouble in
booking it at the top-notch price. Bob Hart had his
bungalow nearly paid for, and Cherry had so many
savings-deposit bank books that she had begun to buy
sectional bookcases on the instalment plan to hold them.

I tell you these things to assure you, even if you can't
believe it, that many, very many of the stage people are
workers with abiding ambitions — just the same as the
man who wants to be president, or the grocery clerk who
wants a home in Flatbush, or a lady who is anxious to
flop out of the Count-pan into the Prince-fire. And I
hope I may be allowed to say, without chipping into the
contribution basket, that they often move in a mysterious
way their wonders to perform.

But, listen.

At the first performance of "Mice Will Play" in New
York at the new Westphalia (no hams alluded to) Theatre,
Winona Cherry was nervous. When she fired at the
photograph of the Eastern beauty on the mantel, the
bullet, instead of penetrating the photo and then striking
the disk, went into the lower left side of Bob Hart's neck.

18 Strictly Business

Not expecting to get it there, Hart collapsed neatly, while
Cherry fainted in a most artistic manner.

The audience, surmising that they viewed a comedy
instead of a tragedy in which the principals were married
or reconciled, applauded with great enjoyment. The
Cool Head, who always graces such occasions, rang the
curtain down, and two platoons of scene shifters respect-
ively and more or less respectfully removed Hart &
Cherry from the stage. The next turn went on, and all
went as merry as an alimony bell.

The stage hands found a young doctor at the stage
entrance who was waiting for a patient with a decoction
of Am. B'ty roses. The doctor examined Hart carefully
and laughed heartily.

" No headlines for you, Old Sport," was his diagnosis.
" If it had been two inches to the left it would have under-
mined the carotid artery as far as the Red Front Drug
Store in Flatbush and Back Again. As it is, you just get
the property man to bind it up with a flounce torn from
any one of the girls' Valenciennes and go home and get
it dressed by the parlor-floor practitioner on your block,
and you'll be all right. Excuse me; I've got a serious
case outside to look after."

After that Bob Hart looked up and felt better. And
then to where he lay came Vincente, the Tramp Juggler,
great in his line. Vincente, a solemn man from Brattle-
boro, Vt., named Sam Grigg3 at home, sent toys and

Strictly Business 19

maple sugar home to two small daughters from every
town he played. Vincente had moved on the same
circuits with Hart & Cherry, and was their peripatetic
friend.

"Bob," said Vincente in his serious way, "I'm glad
it's no worse. The little lady is wild about you."

"Who.?" asked Hart.

"Cherry," said the juggler. "We didn't know how
bad you were hurt; and we kept her away. It's taking
the manager and three girls to hold her."

"It was an accident, of course," said Hart. "Cherry's
all right. She wasn't feeling in good trim or she couldn't
have done it. There's no hard feelings. She's strictly
business. The doctor says I'll be on the job again in
three days. Don't let her worry."

"Man," said Sam Griggs severely, puckering his old,
smooth, lined face, "are you a chess automaton or a
human pincushion ? Cherry's crying her heart out for
you — calling 'Bob, Bob,' every second, with them hold-
ing her hands and keeping her from coming to you."

" What's the matter with her ? " asked Hart, with wide-
open eyes. "The sketch'll go on again in three days.
I'm not hurt bad, the doctor says. She won't lose out
half a week's salary. I know it was an accident. What's
the matter with her?"

"You seem to be blind, or a sort of a fool," said Vin-
cente. "The girl loves you and is almost mad about

20 Strictly Business

your hurt. What's the matter with you? Is she nothing
to you ? I wish you could hear her call you."

"Loves me.^" asked Bob Hart, rising from the stack
of scenery on which he lay. "Cherry loves me? Why,
it's impossible."

"I wish you could see her and hear her," said Griggs.

"But, man," said Bob Hart, sitting up, "it's impossible.
It's impossible, I tell you. I never dreamed of such a
thing."

"No human being," said the Tramp Juggler, "could
mistake it. She's wild for love of you. How have you
been so blind ? "

" But, my God," said Bob Hart, rising to his feet, " ifs
too late. It's too late, I tell you, Sam; it's too late. It
can't be. You must be wrong. It's impossible. There's
some mistake."

" She's crying for you," said the Tramp Juggler. " For
love of you she's fighting three, and calling your name so
loud they don't dare to raise the curtain. Wake up, man."

"For love of me?" said Bob Hart with staring eyes.
" Don't I tell you it's too late ? It's too late, man. Why,
Cherry and I have been married two years! "

THE GOLD THAT GLITTERED

A STORY with a moral appended is like the bill of a
mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop
to irritate your conscience. Therefore let us have the
moral first and be done with it. All is not gold that
glitters, but it is a wise child that keeps the stopper in his
bottle of testing acid.

Where Broadway skirts the corner of the square pre-
sided over by George the Veracious is the Little Rialto.
Here stand the actors of that quarter, and this is their
shibboleth: ***Nit,' says I to Frohman, 'you can't touch
me for a kopeck less than two-fifty per,' and out I walks."

Westward and southward from the Thespian glare are
one or two streets where a Spanish-American colony has
huddled for a little tropical warmth in the nipping North.
The centre of life in this precinct is "El Refugio," a
caf^ and restaurant that caters to the volatile exiles from
the South. Up from Chili, Bolivia, Colombia, the rolling
republics of Central America and the ireful islands of
the Western Indies flit the cloaked and sombreroed
senores, who are scattered like burning lava by the

21

22 Strictly Business

political eruptions of their several countries. Hither they
come to lay counterplots, to bide their time, to solicit
funds, to enlist filibusterers, to smuggle out arms and
ammunitions, to play the game at long taw. In El
Refugio they find the atmosphere in which they thrive.

In the restaurant of El Refugio are served compounds
delightful to the palate of the man from Capricorn or
Cancer. Altruism must halt the story thus long. On,
diner, weary of the culinary subterfuges of the Gallic
chef, hie thee to El Refugio! There only will you find
a fish — bluefish, shad or pompano from the Gulf —
baked after the Spanish method. Tomatoes give it
color, individuality and soul; chili Colorado bestows upon
it zest, originality and fervor; unknown herbs furnish
piquancy and mystery, and — but its crowning glory
deserves a new sentence. Around it, above it, beneath
it, in its vicinity — but never in it — hovers an ethereal
aura, an effluvium so rarefied and delicate that only the
Society for Psychical Research could note its origin. Do
not say that garlic is in the fish at El Refugio. It is not
otherwise than as if the spirit of Garlic, flitting past, has
wafted one kiss that lingers in the parsley-crowned dish
as haunting as those kisses in life, "by hopeless fancy
feigned on lips that are for others." And then, when
Conchito, the waiter, brings you a plate of brown frijoles
and a carafe of wine that has never stood still between
Oporto and El Refugio — ah, Dios !

The Gold That Glittered 23

One day a Hamburg-American liner deposited upon
Pier No. 55 Gen. Perrico Ximenes Villablanca Falcon,
a passenger from Cartagena. The General was between
a claybank and a bay in complexion, had a 42-inch waist
and stood 5 feet 4 with his Du Barry heels. He had the
mustache of a shooting-gallery proprietor, he wore the
full dress of a Texas congressman and had the important
aspect of an uninstructed delegate.

Gen. Falcon had enough English under his hat to
enable him to inquire his way to the street in which El
Refugio stood. When he reached that neighborhood he
saw a sign before a respectable red-brick house that read,
"Hotel Espanol." In the window was a card in Spanish,
"Aqui se habla Espanol." The General entered, sure
of a congenial port.

In the cozy office was Mrs. O'Brien, the proprietress.
She had blond — oh, unimpeachably blond hair. For
the rest she was amiability, and ran largely to inches
around. Gen. Falcon brushed the floor with his broad-
brimmed hat, and emitted a quantity of Spanish, the
syllables sounding like firecrackers gently popping their
way down the string of a bunch.

"Spanish or Dago?" asked Mrs. O'Brien, pleasantly.

"I am a Colombian, madam," said the General,
proudly. "I speak the Spanish. The advisement in
your window say the Spanish he is spoken here. How is
that?"

24 Strictly Business

"Well, you've been speaking it, ain't you?" said the
madam. "I'm sure I can't."

At the Hotel Espanol General Falcon engaged rooms
and established himself. At dusk he sauntered out upon
the streets to view the wonders of this roaring city of the
North. As he walked he thought of the wonderful golden
hair of Mme. O'Brien. "It is here," said the General to
himself, no doubt in his own language, "that one shall
find the most beautiful senoras in the world. I have
not in my Colombia viewed among our beauties one
so fair. But no! It is not for the General Falcon
to think of beauty. It is my country that claims my
devotion."

At the corner of Broadway and the Little Rialto the
General became involved. The street cars bewildered
him, and the fender of one upset him against a pushcart
laden with oranges. A cab driver missed him an inch
with a hub, and poured barbarous execrations upon his
head. He scrambled to the sidewalk and skipped again
in terror when the whistle of a peanut-roaster puffed a
hot scream into his ear. "Vdlgame Dios! What devil's
city is this?"

As the General fluttered out of the streamers of passers
like a wounded snipe he was marked simultaneously as
game by two hunters. One was " Bully" McGuire,
whose system of sport required the use of a strong arm and
the misuse of an eight-inch piece of lead pipe. The other

The Gold That Glittered 25

Nimrod of the asphalt was "Spider" Kelley, a sportsman
with more refined methods.

In pouncing upon their self-evident prey, Mr. Kelley
was a shade the quicker. His elbow fended accurately
the onslaught of Mr. McGuire.

"GVan!" he commanded harshly. "I saw it first."
McGuire slunk away, awed by superior intelligence.

"Pardon me," said Mr. Kelley to the General, "but
you got balled up in the shuffle, didn't you.^ Let me
assist you." He picked up the General's hat and brushed
the dust from it.

The ways of Mr. Kelley could not but succeed. The
General, bew^ildered and dismayed by the resounding
streets, welcomed his deliverer as a caballero with a most
disinterested heart.

"I have a desire," said the General, "to return to the
hotel of O'Brien, in which I am stop. Caramba! senor,
there is a loudness and rapidness of going and coming in
the city of this Nueva York."

Mr. Kelley's politeness would not suffer the distin-
guished Colombian to brave the dangers of the return
unaccompanied. At the door of the Hotel Espanol
they paused. A little lower down on the opposite side
of the street shone the modest illuminated sign of El
Refugio. Mr. Kelley, to whom few streets were
unfamiliar, knew the place exteriorly as a "Dago joint."
All foreigners Mr. Kelley classed under the two heads of

26 Strictly Business

"Dagoes" and Frenchmen. He proposed to the General
that they repair thither and substantiate their acquaint-
ance with a liquid foundation.

An hour later found General Falcon and Mr. Kelley
seated at a table in the conspirator's corner of El Refugio.
Bottles and glasses were between them. For the tenth
time the General confided the secret of his mission to the
Estados Unidos. He was here, he declared, to purchase
arms — 2,000 stands of Winchester rifles — for the Col-
ombian revolutionists. He had drafts in his pocket drawn
by the Cartagena Bank on its New York correspondent for
$25,000. At other tables other revolutionists were shout-
ing their political secrets to their fellow-plotters ; but none
was as loud as the General. He pounded the table; he
hallooed for some wine; he roared to his friend that his
errand was a secret one, and not to be hinted at to a living
soul. Mr. Kelley himself was stirred to sympathetic en-
thusiasm. He grasped the General's hand across the table.

" Monseer," he said, earnestly, " I don't know where this
country of yours is, but I'm for it. I guess it must be a
branch of the United States, though, for the poetry guys
and the schoolmarms call us Columbia, too, sometimes.
It's a lucky thing for you that you butted into me to-night.
I'm the only man in New York that can get this gun deal
through for you. The Secretary of War of the United
States is me best friend. He's in the city now, and I'll
see him for you to-morrow. In the meantime, monseer.

The Gold That Glittered 27

you keep them drafts tight in your inside pocket. I'll
call for you to-morrow, and take you to see him. Say!
that ain't the District of Columbia you're talking about,
is it ^ " concluded Mr. Kelley, with a sudden qualm. '* You
can't capture that with no 2,000 guns — it's been tried
with more."

**No, no, no!" exclaimed the General. "It is the
Republic of Colombia — it is a g-r-reat republic on the
top side of iVmerica of the South. Yes. Yes."

" All right," said Mr. Kelley, reassured. " Now suppose
we trek along home and go by-by. I'll write to the Sec-
retary to-night and make a date with him. It's a ticklish
job to get guns out of New York. McClusky himself
can't do it."

They parted at the door of the Hotel Espafiol. The
General rolled his eyes at the moon and sighed.

**It is a great country, your Nueva York," he said.
"Truly the cars in the streets devastate one, and the
engine that cooks the nuts terribly makes a squeak in the
ear. But, ah, Senor Kelley — the senoras with hair of
much goldness, and admirable fatness — they are mag-
nificas ! Muy magnificas ! "

Kelley went to the nearest telephone booth and called
up McCrary's cafe, far up on Broadway. He asked for
Jimmy Dunn.

" Is that Jimmy Dunn ? " asked Kelley.

"Yes," came the answer.

28 Strictly Business

** You're a liar," sang back Kelley, joyfully. "You're
the Secretary of War. Wait there till I come up. I've
got the finest thing down here in the way of a fish you ever
baited for. It's a Colorado-maduro, with a gold band
around it and free coupons enough to buy a red hall lamp
and a statuette of Psyche rubbering in the brook. I'll
be up on the next car."

Jimmy Dunn was an A. M. of Crookdom. He was
an artist in the confidence line. He never saw a
bludgeon in his life; and he scorned knockout drops.
In fact, he would have set nothing before an intended
victim but the purest of drinks, if it had been pos-
sible to procure such a thing in New York. It was the
ambition of "Spider" Kelley to elevate himself into
Jimmy's class.

These two gentlemen held a conference that night at
McCrary's. Kelley explained.

"He's as easy as a gum shoe. He's from the Island
of Colombia, where there's a strike, or a feud, or some-
thing going on, and they've sent him up here to buy 2,000
Winchesters to arbitrate the thing with. He showed me
two drafts for $10,000 each, and one for $5,000 on a bank
here. 'S truth, Jimmy, I felt real mad with him because
he didn't have it in thousand-dollar bills, and hand it to
me on a silver waiter. Now, we've got to wait till he goes
to the bank and gets the money for us."

They talked it over for two hours, and then Dunn said :

The Gold That Glittered 29

** Bring him to No. — Broadway, at four o'clock to-morrow
afternoon.'*

In due time Kelley called at the Hotel Espaiiol for the
General. He found that wily warrior engaged in delect-
able conversation with Mrs. O'Brien.

"The Secretary of War is waitin' for us," said Kelley.

The General tore himself away with an effort.

"Ay, senor," he said, with a sigh, "duty makes a call.
But, senor, the senoras of your Estados Unidos — how
beauties! For exemplification, take you la Madame
O'Brien — que magnifica! She is one goddess — one
Juno — what you call one ox-eyed Juno."

Now Mr. Kelley was a wit; and better men have been
shriveled by the fire of their own imagination.

" Sure! " he said with a grin; " but you mean a peroxide
Juno, don't you ? "

Mrs. O'Brien heard, and lifted an auriferous head.
Her businesslike eye rested for an instant upon the dis-
appearing form of Mr. Kelley. Except in street cars one
should never be unnecessarily rude to a lady.

When the gallant Colombian and his escort arrived at
the Broadway address, they were held in an anteroom for
half an hour, and then admitted into a well-equipped
office where a distinguished looking man, with a smooth
face, wrote at a desk. General Falcon was presented to
the Secretary of War of the United States, and his mission
made known by his old friend, Mr. Kelley.

30 Strictly Business

"Ah — Colombia!" said the Secretary, significantlj^
when he was made to understand; "I*m afraid there will
be a little difficulty in that case. The President and I
differ in our sympathies there. He prefers the estab-
lished government, while I " the Secretary gave the

General a mysterious but encouraging smile. "You, of
course, know. General Falcon, that since the Tammany
war, an act of Congress has been passed requiring all manu-
factured arms and ammunition exported from this country
to pass through the War Department. Now, if I can do
anything for you I will be glad to do so to oblige my old
friend, Mr. Kelley. But it must be in absolute secrecy,
as the President, as I have said, does not regard favor-
ably the efforts of your revolutionary party in Colombia.
I will have my orderly bring a list of the available arms
now in the warehouse.'*

The Secretary struck a bell, and an orderly with the
letters A. D. T. on his cap stepped promptly into the room.

"Bring me Schedule B of the small arms inventory,"
said the Secretary.

The orderly quickly returned with a printed paper.
The Secretary studied it closely.

"I find," he said, "that in Warehouse 9, of Government
stores, there is a shipment of 2,000 stands of Winches-
ter rifles that were ordered by the Sultan of Morocco,
who forgot to send the cash with his order. Our rule is
that legal-tender money must be paid down at the time

The Gold That Glittered 31

of purchase. My dear Kelley, your friend, General
Falcon, shall have this lot of arms, if he desires it, at
the manufacturer's price. And you will forgive me, I
am sure, if I curtail our interview. I am expecting the
Japanese Minister and Charles Murphy every moment!'*

As one result of this interview, the General was deeply
grateful to his esteemed friend, Mr. Kelley. As another,
the nimble Secretary of War was extremely busy during
the next two days buying empty rifle cases and filling them
with bricks, which were then stored in a warehouse rented
for that purpose. As still another, when the General
returned to the Hotel Espafiol, Mrs. O'Brien went up to
him, plucked a thread from his lapel, and said :

*'Say, senor, I don't want to 'butt in,' but what does
that monkey-faced, cat-eyed, rubber-necked tin horn
tough want with you ? "

" Sangre de mi vida ! " exclaimed the General. ** Impos-
sible it is that you speak of my good friend, Senor Kelley.'*

"Come into the summer garden," said Mrs. O'Brien.
"I want to have a talk with you."

Let us suppose that an hour has elapsed.

"And you say," said the General, "that for the sum of
$18,000 can be purchased the furnishment of the house and
the lease of one year with this garden so lovely — so resem-
bling unto the patios of my care Colombia?'*

"And dirt cheap at that," sighed the lady.

"Ah, Dios!" breathed General Falcon. "What to me

32 Strictly Business

is war and politics? This spot is one paradise. My
country it have other brave heroes to continue the fight-
ing. What to me should be glory and the shooting of
mans ? Ah ! no. It is here I have found one angel. Let
us buy the Hotel Espaiiol and you shall be mine, and the
money shall not be waste on guns."

Mrs. O'Brien rested her blond pompadour against the
shoulder of the Colombian patriot.

"Oh, seiior," she sighed, happily, "ain't you terrible!"

Two days later was the time appointed for the delivery
of the arms to the General. The boxes of supposed rifles
were stacked in the rented warehouse, and the Secretary
of War sat upon them, waiting for his friend Kelley to
fetch the victim.

Mr. Kelley hurried, at the hour, to the Hotel Espanol.
He found the General behind the desk adding up accounts.

"I have decide," said the General, "to buy not guns.
I have to-day buy the insides of this hotel, and there shall
be marrying of the General Perrico Ximenes Villablanca
Falcon with la Madame O'Brien."

Mr. Kelley almost strangled.

"Say, you old bald-headed bottle of shoe polish," he
spluttered, "you're a swindler — that's what you are!
You've bought a boarding house with money belonging
to your infernal country, wherever it is."

"Ah," said the General, footing up a column, "that is
what you call politics. War and revolution they are not

The Gold That Glittered S3

nice. Yes. It is not best that one shall always follow
Minerva. No. It is of quite desirable to keep hotels
and be with that Juno — that ox-eyed Juno. Ah ! what
hair of the gold it is that she have!"

Mr. Kelley choked again.

**Ah, Senor Kelley!" said the General, feelingly and
finally, "is it that you have never eaten of the corned beef
hash that Madame O'Brien she make ?"

Ill

BABES IN THE JUNGLE

Montague silver, the finest street man and art
grafter in the West, says to me once in Little Rock: "If
you ever lose your mind, Billy, and get too old to do honest
swindling among grown men, go to New York. In the
West a sucker is born every minute; but in New York
they appear in chunks of roe — you can't count 'em!"

Two years afterward I found that I couldn't remember
the names of the Russian admirals, and I noticed some
gray hairs over my left ear; so I knew the time had arrived
for me to take Silver's advice.

I struck New York about noon one day, and took a walk
up Broadway. And I run against Silver himself, all
encompassed up in a spacious kind of haberdashery, lean-
ing against a hotel and rubbing the half-moons on his
nails with a silk handkerchief.

" Paresis or superannuated ? " I asks him.

" Hello, Billy," says Silver; " I'm glad to see you. Yes,
it seemed to me that the West was accumulating a little
too much wiseness. I've been saving New York for des-
sert. I know it's a low-down trick to take things from

84

Babes in the Jungle S5

these people. They only know this and that and pass to
and fro and think ever and anon. I'd hate for my mother
to know I was skinning these weak-minded ones. She
raised me better."

" Is there a crush already in the waiting rooms of the
old doctor that does skin grafting .^ " I asks.

"Well, no," says Silver; "you needn't back Epidermis
to win to-day. I've only been here a month. But I'm
ready to begin; and the members of Willie Manhattan's
Sunday School class, each of whom has volunteered to
contribute a portion of cuticle toward this rehabilitation,
may as well send their photos to the Evening Daily.

"I've been studying the town," says Silver, "and read-
ing the papers every day, and I know it as well as the cat
in the City Hall knows an O 'Sullivan. People here lie
down on the floor and scream and kick when you are the
least bit slow about taking money from them. Come up
in my room and I'll tell you. We'll work the town together,
Billy, for the sake of old times."

Silver takes me up in a hotel. He has a quantity of
irrelevant objects lying about.

"There's more ways of getting money from these
metropolitan hayseeds," says Silver, "than there is of
cooking rice in Charleston, S. C. They'll bite at any-
thing. The brains of most of 'em commute. The wiser
they are in intelligence the less perception of cognizance
they have. Why, didn't a man the other day sell J. P.

36 Strictly Business

Morgan an oil portrait of Rockefeller, Jr., for Andrea del
Sarto's celebrated painting of the young Saint John !

"You see that bundle of printed stuff in the comer,
Billy ? That's gold mining stock. I started out one day
to sell that, but I quit it in two hours. Why? Got
arrested for blocking the street. People fought to buy it.
I sold the policeman a block of it on the way to the station-
house, and then I took it off the market. I don't want
people to give me their money. I want some little con-
sideration connected with the transaction to keep my pride
from being hurt. I want 'em to guess the missing letter
in Chic — go, or draw to a pair of nines before they pay
me a cent of money.

**Now there's another little scheme that worked so
easy I had to quit it. You see that bottle of blue ink on
the table ? I tattooed an anchor on the back of my hand
and went to a bank and told 'em I was Admiral Dewey's
nephew. They offered to cash my draft on him for a
thousand, but I didn't know my uncle's first name. It
shows, though, what an easy town it is. As for burglars,
they won't go in a house now unless there's a hot supper
ready and a few college students to wait on 'em. They're
slugging citizens all over the upper part of the city and I
guess, taking the town from end to end, it's a plain case of
assault and Battery."

** Monty," says I, when Silver had slacked up, "you
may have Manhattan correctly discriminated in your pero-

Babes in the Jungle 37

rative, but I doubt it. I've only been in town two hours,
but it don't dawn upon me that it's ours with a cherry in it.
There ain't enough rus in urbe about it to suit me. I'd
be a good deal much better satisfied if the citizens
had a straw or more in their hair, and run more to
velveteen vests and buckeye watch charm. They don't
look easy to me."

*** You've got it, Billy," says Silver. '*A11 er igrants
have it. New York's bigger than Little Rock or Europe,
and it frightens a foreigner. You'll be all right. I tell
you I feel like slapping the people here because they don't
send me all their money in laundry baskets, with germicide
sprinkled over it. I hate to go down on the street to get it.
Who wears the diamonds in this town? Why, Winnie,
the Wiretapper's wife, and Bella, the Buncosteerer's bride.
New Yorkers can be worked easier than a blue rose on a
tidy. The only thing that bothers me is I know I'll break
the cigars in my vest pocket when I get my clothes all full
of twenties.'*

"I hope you are right, Monty," says I; "but I wish all
the same I had been satisfied with a small business in Little
Rock. The crop of farmers is never so short out there
but what you can get a few of 'em to sign a petition for a
new post office that you can discount for $200 at the county
bank. The people here appear to possess instincts of self-
preservation and illiberality. I fear me that we are not
cultured enough to tackle this game."

38 Strictly Business

" Don't won^ " says Silver. *' I've got this Jayville-
near-Tarrytown correctly estimated as sure as North River
is the Hudson and East River ain't a river. Why, there are
people living in four blocks of Broadway who never saw
any kind of a building except a skyscraper in their lives !
A good, live hustling Western man ought to get conspicu-
ous enough here inside of three months to incur either
Jerome's clemency or Lawson's displeasure. "

" Hyperbole aside," says I, " do you know of any imme-
diate system of buncoing the community out of a dollar
or two except by applying to the Salvation Army or hav-
ing a fit on Miss Helen Gould's doorsteps ? "

"Dozens of 'em," says Silver. "How much capital
have you got, Billy ?"

" A thousand," I told him.

"I've got $1,200," says he. "We'll pool and do a big
piece of business. There's so many ways we can make
a million that I don't know how to begin."

The next morning Silver meets me at the hotel and he is
all sonorous and stirred with a kind of silent joy.

"We're to meet J. P. Morgan this afternoon," says he.
"A man I know in the hotel wants to introduce us. He's
a friend of his. He says he likes to meet people from
the West."

"That sounds nice and plausible," says I. "I'd like
to know Mr. Morgan."

"It won't hurt us a bit, "says Silver, "to get acquainted

Babes in the Jungle 39

with a few finance kings. I kind of like the social way
New York has with strangers."

The man Silver knew was named Klein. At three
o'clock Klein brought his Wall Street friend to see us in
Silver's room. **Mr. Morgan" looked some like his pic-
tures, and he had a Turkish towel wrapped around his
left foot, and he walked with a cane.

"Mr. Silver and Mr. Pescud," says Klein. "It sounds
superfluous," says he, "to mention the name of the great-
est financial "

"Cut it out, Klein," says Mr. Morgan. "I'm glad
to know you gents; I take great interest in the West.
Klein tells me you're from Little Rock. I think
I've a railroad or two out there somewhere. If either
of you guys would like to deal a hand or two of stud
poker I "

"Now, Pierpont," cuts in Klein, "you forget!"

" Excuse me, gents ! " says Morgan ; " since I've had the
gout so bad I sometimes play a social game of cards at
my house. Neither of you never knew One-eyed Peters,
did you, while you was around Little Rock ? He lived in
Seattle, New Mexico."

Before we could answer, Mr. Morgan hammers on the
floor with his cane and begins to walk up and down, swear-
ing in a loud tone of voice.

"They have been pounding your stocks to-day on the
Street, Pierpont ? " asks Klein smiling.

40 Strictly Business

"Stocks! No!" roars Mr. Morgan. **It*s that pic-
ture I sent an agent to Europe to buy. I just thought
about it. He cabled me to-day that it ain't to be found
in all Italy. I'd pay $50,000 to-morrow for that picture —
yes, $75,000. I give the agent a la carte in purchasing it.
I cannot understand why the art galleries will allow a
DeVinchyto "

" Why, Mr. Morgan," says Klein; ** I thought you owned
all of the De Vinchy paintings. "

"What is the picture like, Mr. Morgan?" asks
Silver. "It must be as big as the side of the Flatiron
Building."

"I'm afraid your art education is on the bum, Mr.
Silver," says Morgan. "The picture is 27 inches by 42;
and it is called * Love's Idle Hour.' It represents a num-
ber of cloak models doing the two-step on the bank of a
purple river. The cablegram said it might have been
brought to this country. My collection will never be com-
plete without that picture. Well, so long, gents; us finan-
ciers must keep early hours."

Mr. Morgan and Klein went away together in a cab.
Me and Silver talked about how simple and unsuspecting
great people was; and Silver said what a shame it would
be to try to rob a man like Mr. Morgan; and I said I
thought it would be rather imprudent, myself. Klein
proposes a stroll after dinner; and me and him and
Silver walks down toward Seventh Avenue to see the sights.

Babes in the Jungle 41

Klein sees a pair of cuff links that instigate his admiration
in a pawnshop window, and we all go in while he buys 'em.

After we got back to the hotel and Klein had gone, Silver
jumps at me and waves his hands.

" Did you see it ? " says he. " Did you see it, Billy ? "

"What?" I asks.

** Why, that picture that Morgan wants. It's hanging
in that pawnshop, behind the desk. I didn't say any-
thing because Klein was there. It's the article sure as
you live. The girls are as natural as paint can make
them, all measuring 36 and 25 and 42 skirts, if they had
any skirts, and they're doing a buck-and-wing on the bank
of a river with the blues. What did Mr. Morgan say
he'd give for it ? Oh, don't make me tell you. They
can't know what it is in that pawnshop."

When the pawnshop opened the next morning me and
Silver was standing there as anxious as if we wanted to
soak our Sunday suit to buy a drink. We sauntered
inside, and began to look at watch-chains.

''That's a violent specimen of a chromo you've got
up there," remarked Silver, casual, to the pawnbroker.
"But I kind of enthuse over the girl with the shoulder-
blades and red bunting. Would an offer of $2.25 for it
cause you to knock over any fragile articles of your stock
in hurrying it off the nail ? "

The pawnbroker smiles and goes on showing us plate
watch-chains.

42 Strictly Business

"That picture," says he, "was pledged a year ago by
an ItaHan gentleman. I loaned him $500 on it. It is
called * Love's Idle Hour,' and it is by Leonardo de Vinchy.
Two days ago the legal time expired, and it became an
unredeemed pledge. Here is a style of chain that is worn
a great deal now. "

At the end of half an hour me and Silver paid the pawn-
broker $2,000 and walked out with the picture. Silver
got into a cab with it and started for Morgan's office. I
goes to the hotel and waits for him. In two hours Silver
comes back.

" Did you see Mr. Morgan ? " I asks. *' How much did
he pay you for it ? "

Silver sits down and fools with a tassel on the table cover.

"I never exactly saw Mr. Morgan," he says, "because
Mr. Morgan's been in Europe for a month. But what's
worrying me, Billy, is this: The department stores have
all got that same picture on sale, framed, for $3.48. And
they charge $3.50 for the frame alone — that's what I can't
understand.'*

IV

THE DAY RESURGENT

I CAN see the artist bite the end of his pencil and frown
when it comes to drawing his Easter picture; for his legiti-
mate pictorial conceptions of figures pertinent to the fes-
tival are but four in number.

First comes Easter, pagan goddess of spring. Here his
fancy may have free play. A beautiful maiden with
decorative hair and the proper number of toes will fill
the bill. Miss Clarice St. Vavasour, the well-known
model, will pose for it in the "Lethergogallagher," or
whatever it was that Trilby called it.

Second — the melancholy lady with upturned eyes in a
framework of lilies. This is magazine-covery, but reliable.

Third — Miss Manhattan in the Fifth Avenue Easter
Sunday parade.

Fourth — Maggie Murphy with a new red feather in
her old straw hat, happy and self-conscious, in the Grand
Street turnout.

Of course, the rabbits do not count. Nor the Easter
eggs, since the higher criticism has hard-boiled them.

The limited field of its pictorial possibilities proves that

43

44 Strictly Business

Easter, of all our festival days, is the most vague and
shifting in our conception. It belongs to all religions,
although the pagans invented it. Going back still fur-
ther to the first spring, we can see Eve choosing with pride
a new green leaf from the tree -ficus car tea.

Now, the object of this critical and learned preamble is to
set forth the theorem that Easter is neither a date, a season,
a festival, a holiday nor an occasion. What it is you shall
find out if you follow in the footsteps of Danny McCree.

Easter Sunday dawned as it should, bright and early, in
its place on the calendar between Saturday and Monday.
At 5.24 the sun rose, and at 10.30 Danny followed its exam-
ple. He went into the kitchen and washed his face at the
sink. His mother was frying bacon. She looked at his
hard, smooth, knowing countenance as he juggled with
the round cake of soap, and thought of his father when she
first saw him stopping a hot grounder between second and
third twenty-two years before on a vacant lot in Harlem,
where the La Paloma apartment house now stands. In
the front room of the flat Danny's father sat by an open
window smoking his pipe, with his dishevelled gray hair
tossed about by the breeze. He still clung to his pipe,
although his sight had been taken from him two years
before by a precocious blast of giant powder that went
off without permission. Very few blind men care for
smoking, for the reason that they cannot see the smoke.
Now, could you enjoy having the news read to you from

The Day Resurgent 45

an evening newspaper unless you could see the colors
of the headlines ?

" 'Tis Easter Day," said Mrs. McCree.

** Scramble mine," said Danny.

After breakfast he dressed himself in the Sabbath morn-
ing costume of the Canal Street importing house dray
chauffeur — frock coat, striped trousers, patent leathers,
gilded trace chain across front of vest, and wing collar,
rolled-brim derby and butterfly bow from Schonstein's
(between Fourteenth Street and Tony's fruit stand)
Saturday night sale.

"You'll be goin' out this day, of course, Danny," said
old man McCree, a little wistfully. *' 'Tis a kind of holi-
day, they say. Well, it's fine spring weather. I can feel
it in the air."

"Why should I not be going out?" demanded Danny
in his grumpiest chest tones. " Should I stay in ? Am I
as good as a horse ? One day of rest my team has a week.
Who earns the money for the rent and the breakfast you've
just eat, I'd like to know ? Answer me that ! **

"All right, lad," said the old man. "I'm not com-
plainin'. While me two eyes was good there was nothin*
better to my mind than a Sunday out. There's a smell
of turf and burnin' brush comin' in the windy. I have
me tobaccy. A good fine day and rist to ye, lad. Times
I wish your mother had larned to read, so I might hear
the rest about the hippopotamus — but let that be."

46 Strictly Business

"Now, what is this fooHshness he talks of hippopota-
muses ? " asked Danny of his mother, as he passed through
the kitchen. "Have you been taking him to the Zoo?
And for what ? "

"I have not," said Mrs. McCree. "He sets by the
windy all day. 'Tis little recreation a blind man among
the poor gets at all. I'm thinkin' they wander in their
minds at times. One day he talks of grease without stop-
pin' for the most of an hour. I looks to see if there's lard
burnin' in the fryin' pan. There is not. He says I do
not understand. 'Tis weary days, Sundays, and holidays
and all, for a blind man, Danny. There was no better
nor stronger than him when he had his two eyes. 'Tis a
fine day, son. Injoy yeself ag'inst the morning. There
will be cold supper at six."

" Have you heard any talk of a hippopotamus ? " asked
Danny of Mike, the janitor, as he went out the door
downstairs.

" I have not," said Mike, pulling his shirtsleeves higher.
" But 'tis the only subject in the animal, natural and ille-
gal lists of outrages that I've not been complained to about
these two days. See the landlord. Or else move out if
ye like. Have ye hippopotamuses in the lease ? No,
then?"

"It was the old man who spoke of it," said Danny.
"Likely there's nothing in it."

Danny walked up the street to the Avenue and then

The Day Resurgent 47

struck northward into the heart of the district where
Easter — modern Easter, in new, bright raiment — leads
the pascal march. Out of towering brown churches came
the blithe music of anthems from the choirs. The broad
sidewalks were moving parterres of living flowers — so it
seemed when your eye looked upon the Easter girl.

Gentlemen, frock-coated, silk-hatted, gardeniaed, sus-
tained the background of the tradition. Children carried
lilies in their hands. The windows of the brown-stone
mansions were packed with the most opulent creations of
Flora, the sister of the Lady of the Lilies.

Around a corner, white-gloved, pink-gilled and tightly
buttoned, walked Corrigan, the cop, shield to the curb.
Danny knew him.

*'Why, Corrigan," he asked, "is Easter? I know it
comes the first time you're full after the moon rises on the
seventeenth of March — but why ? Is it a proper and
religious ceremony, or does the Governor appoint it out of
politics ? "

'* 'Tis an annual celebration," said Corrigan, with the
judicial air of the Third Deputy Police Commissioner,
*' peculiar to New York. It extends up to Harlem. Some-
times they has the reserves out at One Hundred and
Twenty-fifth Street. In my opinion 'tis not political."

"Thanks," said Danny. "And say — did you ever
hear a man complain of hippopotamuses ? When not
specially in drink, I mean."

48 Strictly Business

"Nothing larger than sea turtles," said Corrigan, reflect-
ing, " and there was wood alcohol in that."

Danny wandered . The double, heavy incumbency of en-
joying simultaneously a Sunday and a festival day was his.

The sorrows of the hand-toiler fit him easily. They
are worn so often that they hang with the picturesque
lines of the best tailor-made garments. That is why well-
fed artists of pencil and pen find in the griefs of the common
people their most striking models. But when the Phil-
istine would disport himself, the grimness of Melpomene,
herself, attends upon his capers. Therefore, Danny set
his jaw hard at Easter, and took his pleasure sadly.

The family entrance of Dugan's cafe was feasible; so
Danny yielded to the vernal season as far as a glass of bock.
Seated in a dark, linoleumed, humid back room, his heart
and mind still groped after the mysterious meaning of the
springtime jubilee.

" Say, Tim," he said to the waiter, " why do they have
Easter?"

*' Skiddoo ! " said Tim, closing a sophisticated eye. " Is
that a new one ? All right. Tony Pastor's for you last
night, I guess. I give it up. What's the answer — two
apples or a yard and a half ? "

From Dugan's Danny turned back eastward. The
April sun seemed to stir in him a vague feeling that he
could not construe. He made a wrong diagnosis and
decided that it was Katy Conlon.

The Day Resurgent 49

A block from her house on Avenue A he met her going
to church. They pumped hands on the corner.

" Gee ! but you look dumpish and dressed up," said Katy.
" What's wrong ? Come away with me to church and be
cheerful."

*' What's doing at church ? " asked Danny.

'*Why, it's Easter Sunday. Silly! I waited till after
eleven expectin' you might come around to go."

** What does this Easter stand for, Katy," asked Danny
gloomily. "Nobody seems to know."

" Nobody as blind as you," said Katy with spirit. " You
haven't even looked at my new hat. And skirt. Why,
it's when all the girls put on new spring clothes. Silly!
Are you coming to church with me ? "

"I will," said Danny. "If this Easter is pulled off
there, they ought to be able to give some excuse for it.
Not that the hat ain't a beauty. The green roses are
great."

At church the preacher did some expounding with no
pounding. He spoke rapidly, for he was in a hurry to get
home to his early Sabbath dinner; but he knew his busi-
ness. There was one word that controlled his theme —
resurrection. Not a new creation; but a new life arising
out of the old. The congregation had heard it often before.
But there was a wonderful hat, a combination of sweet
peas and lavender, in the sixth pew from the pulpit. It
attracted much attention.

50 Strictly Business

After church Danny lingered on a corner while Katy
waited, with pique in her sky-blue eyes.

"Are you coming along to the house?" she asked.
*' But don't mind me. I'll get there all right. You seem
to be studyin' a lot about something. All right. Will I
see you at any time specially, Mr. McCree ? "

" I'll be around Wednesday night as usual," said Danny,
turning and crossing the street.

Katy walked away with the green roses dangling indig-
nantly. Danny stopped two blocks away. He stood still
with his hands in his pockets, at the curb on the corner.
His face was that of a graven image. Deep in his soul
something stirred so small, so fine, so keen and leavening
that his hard fibres did not recognize it. It was something
more tender than the April day, more subtle than the call
of the senses, purer and deeper-rooted than the love of
woman — for had he not turned away from green roses
and eyes that had kept him chained for a year? And
Danny did not know what it was. The preacher, who
was in a hurry to go to his dinner, had told him, but Danny
had had no libretto with which to follow the drowsy inton-
ation. But the preacher spoke the truth.

Suddenly Danny slapped his leg and gave forth a hoarse
yell of delight.

"Hippopotamus!" he shouted to an elevated road
pillar. "Well, how is that for a bum guess ? Why, blast
my skylights! I know what he was driving at now.

The Day Resurgent 51

"Hippopotamus! Wouldn't that send you to the
Bronx! It's been a year since he heard it; and he didn't
miss it so very far. We quit at 469 B. C, and this comes
next. Well, a wooden man wouldn't have guessed what
he was trj^ing to get out of him."

Danny caught a crosstown car and went up to the rear
flat that his labor supported.

Old man McCree was still sitting by the window. His
extinct pipe lay on the sill.

"Will that be you, lad .?" he asked.

Danny flared into the rage of a strong man who is sur-
prised at the outset of committing a good deed.

"Who pays the rent and buys the food that is eaten
in this house .^" he snapped, viciously. "Have I no right
to come in .^"

"Ye're a faithful lad," said old man McCree, with a
sigh. "Is it evening yet?"

Danny reached up on a shelf and took down a thick
book labeled in gilt letters, "The History of Greece."
Dust was on it half an inch thick. He laid it on the table
and found a place in it marked by a strip of paper. And
then he gave a short roar at the top of his voice, and said :

"Was it the hippopotamus you wanted to be read to
about then.?"

"Did I hear ye open the book ?" said old man McCree.
"Many and weary be the months since my lad has read
it to me. I dinno; but I took a great likings to them

52 Strictly Business

Greeks. Ye left off at a place. 'Tis a fine day outside,
lad. Be out and take rest from your work. I have gotten
used to me chair by the windy and me pipe."

"Pel-Peloponnesus was the place where we left off,
and not hippopotamus," said Danny. "The war began
there. It kept something doing for thirty years. The
headlines says that a guy named Philip of Macedon, in 338
B. C, got to be boss of Greece by getting the decision at
the battle of Cher-Cheronsea. I'll read it."

With his hand to his ear, rapt in the Peloponnesian War,
old man McCree sat for an hour, listening.

Then he got up and felt his way to the door of the
kitchen. Mrs. McCree was slicing cold meat. She
looked up. Tears were running from old man Mo-
Cree's eyes.

"Do ye hear our lad readin' to me ?" he said. "There
is none finer in the land. My two eyes have come back
to me again."

After supper he said to Danny: " 'Tis a happy day,
this Easter. And now ye will be off to see Katy in the
evening. Well enough."

"Who pays the rent and buys the food that is eaten in
this house?" said Danny, angrily. "Have I no right to
stay in it ? After supper there is yet to come the reading
of the battle of Corinth, 146 B. C, when the kingdom, as
they say, became an in-integral portion of the Roman
Empire* Am I nothing in this house?"

THE FIFTH WHEEL

1 HE ranks of the Bed Line moved closer together; for
it was cold, cold. They were alluvial deposit of the stream
of life lodged in the delta of Fifth Avenue and Broadway.
The Bed Liners stamped their freezing feet, looked at the
empty benches in Madison Square whence Jack Frost had
evicted them, and muttered to one another in a confusion
of tongues. The Flatiron Building, with its impious,
cloud-piercing architecture looming mistily above them
on the opposite delta, might well have stood for the tower
of Babel, whence these polyglot idlers had been called
by the winged walking delegate of the Lord.

Standing on a pine box a head higher than his flock
of goats, the Preacher exhorted whatever transient and
shifting audience the north wind doled out to him. It
was a slave market. Fifteen cents bought you a man.
You deeded him to Morpheus; and the recording angel
gave you credit.

The Preacher was incredibly earnest and unwearied.
He had looked over the list of things one may do for one's
fellow man, and had assumed for himself the task of

63

54 Strictly Business

putting to bed all who might apply at his soap box on the
nights of Wednesday and Sunday. That left but five
nights for other philanthropists to handle; and had they
done their part as well, this wicked city might have
become a vast Arcadian dormitory where all might snooze
and snore the happy hours away, letting problem plays
and the rent man and business go to the deuce.

The hour of eight was but a little while past; sightseers
in a small, dark mass of pay ore were gathered in the
shadow of General Worth's monument. Now and then,
shyly, ostentatiously, carelessly, or with conscientious
exactness one would step forward and bestow upon the
Preacher small bills or silver. Then a lieutenant of
Scandinavian coloring and enthusiasm would march
away to a lodging house with a squad of the redeemed.
All the while the Preacher exhorted the crowd in terms
beautifully devoid of eloquence — splendid with the
deadly, accusive monotony of truth. Before the picture
of the Bed Liners fades you must hear one phrase of the
Preacher's — the one that formed his theme that night.
It is worthy of being stenciled on all the white ribbons in
the world.

** No man ever learned to he a drunkard on five-cent
whisky.'*

Think of it, tippler. It covers the ground from the
sprouting rye to the Potter's Field.

A clean-profiled, erect young man in the rear rank of

The Fifth Wheel 55

the bedless emulated the terrapin, drawing his head far
down into the shell of his coat collar. It was a well-cut
tweed coat; and the trousers still showed signs of having
flattened themselves beneath the compelling goose. But,
conscientiously, I must warn the milliner's apprentice
who reads this, expecting a Reginald Montressor in straits,
to peruse no further. The young man was no other than
Thomas McQuade, ex-coachman, discharged for drunk-
enness one month before, and now reduced to the grimy
ranks of the one-night bed seekers.

If you live in smaller New York you must know the
Van Smuythe family carriage, drawn by the two 1,500-
pound, 100 to 1-shot bays. The carriage is shaped like
a bath-tub. In each end of it reclines an old lady Van
Smuythe holding a black sunshade the size of a New
Year's Eve feather tickler. Before his downfall Thomas
McQuade drove the Van Smuythe bays and was himself
driven by Annie, the Van Smuythe lady's maid. But it
is one of the saddest things about romance that a tight
shoe or an empty commissary or an aching tooth will make
a temporary heretic of any Cupid-worshiper. And
Thomas's physical troubles were not few. Therefore, his
soul was less vexed with thoughts of his lost lady's maid
than it was by the fancied presence of certain non-existent
things that his racked nerves almost convinced him were
flyiag, dancing, crawling, and wriggling on the asphalt
and in the air above and around the dismal campus of the

56 Strictly Business

Bed Line army. Nearly four weeks of straight whisky
and a diet limited to crackers, bologna, and pickles often
guarantees a psycho-zoological sequel. Thus desperate,
freezing, angry, beset by phantoms as he was, he felt the
need of human sympathy and intercourse.

The Bed Liner standing at his right was a young man of
about his own age, shabby but neat.

"What's the diagnosis of your case, Freddy?" asked
Thomas, with the freemasonic familiarity of the damned
— " Booze ? That's mine. You don't look like a pan-
handler. Neither am I. A month ago I was pushing
the lines over the backs of the finest team of Percheron
buffaloes that ever made their mile down Fifth Avenue
in 2.85. And look at me now! Say; how do you come
to be at this bed bargain-counter rummage sale?"

The other young man seemed to welcome the advances
of the airy ex-coachman.

"No," said he, "mine isn't exactly a case of drink.
Unless we allow that Cupid is a bartender. I married
unwisely, according to the opinion of my unforgiving
relatives. I've been out of work for a year because I
don't know how to work; and I've been sick in Bellevue
and other hospitals four months. My wife and kid had
to go back to her mother. I was turned out of the
hospital yesterday. And I haven't a cent. That's my
tale of woe."

"Tough luck," said Thomas. "A man alone can pull

The Fifth Wheel 57

through all right. But I hate to see the women and kids
get the worst of it."

Just then there hummed up Fifth Avenue a motor car
so splendid, so red, so smoothly running, so craftily
demolishing the speed regulations that it drew the atten-
tion even of the listless Bed Liners. Suspended and
pinioned on its left side was an extra tire.

When opposite the unfortunate company the fastenings
of this tire became loosed. It fell to the asphalt, bounded
and rolled rapidly in the wake of the flying car.

Thomas McQuade, scenting an opportunity, darted
from his place among the Preacher's goats. In thirty
seconds he had caught the rolling tire, swung it over his
shoulder, and was trotting smartly after the car. On
both sides of the avenue people were shouting, whistling,
and waving canes at the red car, pointing to the enter-
prising Thomas coming up with the lost tire.

One dollar, Thomas had estimated, was the smallest
guerdon that so grand an automobilist could offer for the
service he had rendered, and save his pride.

Two blocks away the car had stopped. There was a
little, brown, muffled chauffeur driving, and an imposing
gentleman wearing a magnificent sealskin coat and a silk
hat on a rear seat.

Thomas proffered the captured tire with his best
cx-coachman manner and a look in the brighter of his
reddened eyes that was meant to be suggestive to the

58 Strictly Business

extent of a silver coin or two and receptive up to higher
denominations.

But the look was not so construed. The sealskinned
gentleman received the tire, placed it inside the car, gazed
intently at the ex-coachman, and muttered to himself
inscrutable words.

*' Strange — strange!" said he. "Once or twice even
I, myself, have fancied that the Chaldean Chiroscope has
availed. Could it be possible.^"

Then he addressed less mysterious words to the waiting
and hopeful Thomas.

"Sir, I thank you for your kind rescue of my tire. And
I would ask you, if I may, a question. Do you know the
family of Van Smuythes living in Washington Square
North?"

"Oughtn't I to?" replied Thomas. "I lived there.
Wish I did yet."

The sealskinned gentleman opened a door of the car.

"Step in, please," he said. "You have been expected."

Thomas McQuade obeyed with surprise but without
hesitation. A seat in a motor car seemed better than
standing room in the Bed Line. But after the lap-robe
had been tucked about him and the auto had sped on
its course, the peculiarity of the invitation lingered in
his mind.

"Maybe the guy hasn't got any change," was his diag-
nosis. "Lots of these swell rounders don't lug about any

The Fifth Wheel 59

ready money. Guess he'll dump me out when he gets
to some joint where he can get cash on his mug. Any-
how, it's a cinch that I've got that open-air bed convention
beat to a finish."

Submerged in his greatcoat, the mysterious automo-
bilist seemed, himself, to marvel at the surprises of life.
*' Wonderful! amazing! strange!" he repeated to himself
constantly.

When the car had well entered the crosstown Seventies
it swung eastward a half block and stopped before a row
of high-stooped, brownstone-front houses.

"Be kind enough to enter my house with me," said the
sealskinned gentleman when they had alighted. "He's
going to dig up, sure," reflected Thomas, following
him inside.

There was a dim light in the hall. His host conducted
him through a door to the left, closing it after him and
leaving them in absolute darkness. Suddenly a luminous
globe, strangely decorated, shone faintly in the centre of
an immense room that seemed to Thomas more splendidly
appointed than any he had ever seen on the stage or read
of in fairy stories.

The walls were hidden by gorgeous red hangings
embroidered with fantastic gold figures. At the rear end
of the room were draped portieres of dull gold spangled
with silver crescents and stars. The furniture was of the
costliest and rarest styles. The ex-coachman's feet sank

60 Strictly Business

into rugs as fleecy and deep as snowdrifts. There were
three or four oddly shaped stands or tables covered with
black velvet drapery.

Thomas McQuade took in the splendors of this palatial
apartment with one eye. With the other he looked for his
imposing conductor — to find that he had disappeared.

"B'gee!" muttered Thomas, "this listens like a spook
shop. Shouldn't wonder if it ain't one of these Moravian
Nights' adventures that you read about. Wonder what
became of the furry guy."

Suddenly a stuffed owl that stood on an ebony perch
near the illuminated globe slowly raised his wings and
emitted from his eyes a brilliant electric glow.

With a fright-born imprecation, Thomas seized a
bronze statuette of Hebe from a cabinet near by and hurled
it with all his might at the terrifying and impossible fowl.
The owl and his perch went over with a crash. With the
sound there was a click, and the room was flooded with
light from a dozen frosted globes along the walls and ceil-
ing. The gold portieres parted and closed, and the
mysterious automobilist entered the room. He was tall
and wore evening dress of perfect cut and accurate taste.
A Vandyke beard of glossy, golden brown, rather long
and wavy hair, smoothly parted, and large, magnetic,
orientally occult eyes gave him a most impressive and
striking appearance. If you can conceive a Russian
Grand Duke in a Rajah's throne-room advancing to

The Fifth Wheel 61

greet a visiting Emperor, you will gather something of
the majesty of his manner. But Thomas McQuade was
too near his d fs to be mindful of his p's and q*s. When
he viewed this silken, polished, and somewhat terrifying
host he thought vaguely of dentists.

"Say, doc," said he resentfully, "that's a hot bird you
keep on tap. I hope I didn't break anything. But I've
nearly got the williwalloos, and when he threw them 32-
candle-power lamps of his on me, I took a snap-shot at
him with that little brass Flatiron Girl that stood on the
sideboard.'*

"That is merely a mechanical toy," said the gentleman
with a wave of his hand. "May I ask you to be seated
while I explain why I brought you to my house. Perhaps
you would not understand nor be in sympathy with the
psychological prompting that caused me to do so. So I
will come to the point at once by venturing to refer to your
admission that you know the Van Smuythe family, of
Washington Square North."

"Any silver missing?" asked Thomas tartly. "Any
joolry displaced ? Of course I know 'em. Any of the
old ladies' sunshades disappeared ? Well, I know 'em.
And then what ? "

The Grand Duke rubbed his white hands together
softly.

"Wonderful!" he murmured. "Wonderful! Shall I
come to believe in the Chaldean Chiroscope myself ? Let

62 Strictly Business

me assure you," he continued, "that there is nothing for
you to fear. Instead, I think I can promise you that very
good fortune awaits you. We will see."

*' Do they want me back .^ " asked Thomas, with some-
thing of his old professional pride in his voice. "I'll
promise to cut out the booze and do the right thing if
they'll try me again. But how did you get wise, doc ?
B'gee, it's the swellest employment agency I was ever in,
with its flashlight owls and so forth."

With an indulgent smile the gracious host begged to
be excused for two minutes. He went out to the side-
walk and gave an order to the chauffeur, who still waited
with the car. Returning to the mysterious apartment,
he sat by his guest and began to entertain him so well by
his witty and genial converse that the poor Bed Liner
almost forgot the cold streets from which he had been
so recently and so singularly rescued. A servant brought
some tender cold fowl and tea biscuits and a glass of
miraculous wine ; and Thomas felt the glamour of Arabia
envelop him. Thus half an hour sped quickly; and then
the honk of the returned motor car at the door suddenly
drew the Grand Duke to his feet, with another soft petition
for a brief absence.

Two women, well muffled against the cold, were
admitted at the front door and suavely conducted by the
master of the house down the hall through another door
to the left and into a smaller room, which was screened

The Fifth Wheel 63

and segregated from the larger front room by heavy,
double portieres. Here the furnishings were even more
elegant and exquisitely tasteful than in the other. On a
gold-inlaid rosewood table were scattered sheets of white
paper and a queer, triangular instrument or toy, apparently
of gold, standing on little wheels.

The taller woman threw back her black veil and loosened
her cloak. She was fifty, with a wrinkled and sad face.
The other, young and plump, took a chair a little distance
away and to the rear as a servant or an attendant might
have done.

"You sent for me. Professor Cherubusco," said the
elder woman, wearily. "I hope you have something
more definite than usual to say. I've about lost the little
faith I had in your art. I would not have responded to
your call this evening if my sister had not insisted upon it."

"Madam," said the professor, with his princeliest
smile, " the true Art cannot fail. To find the true psychic
and potential branch sometimes requires time. We have
not succeeded, I admit, with the cards, the crystal, the
stars, the magic formulae of Zarazin, nor the Oracle of Po.
But we have at last discovered the true psychic route.
The Chaldean Chiroscope has been successful in our
search."

The professor's voice had a ring that seemed to pro-
claim his belief in his own words. The elderly lady
looked at him with a little more interest.

64 Strictly Business

"Why, there was no sense in those words that it
wrote with my hands on it," she said. " What do
you mean?"

"The words were these," said Professor Cherubusco,
rising to his full magnificent height: " 'By the fifth wheel
of the chariot he shall come.'''

"I haven't seen many chariots," said the lady, "but
I never saw one with five wheels."

"Progress," said the professor — "progress in science
and mechanics has accomplished it — though, to be exact,
we may speak of it only as an extra tire. Progress in
occult art has advanced in proportion. Madam, I repeat
that the Chaldean Chiroscope has succeeded. I can not
only answer the question that you have propounded, but
I can produce before your eyes the proof thereof."

And now the lady was disturbed both in her disbelief
and in her poise.

" O professor ! " she cried anxiously — " When ? —
where ? Has he been found ? Do not keep me in
suspense."

" I beg you will excuse me for a very few minutes," said
Professor Cherubusco, "and I think I can demonstrate
to you the efficacy of the true Art."

Thomas was contentedly munching the last crumbs of
the bread and fowl when the enchanter appeared sud-
denly at his side.

"Are you willing to return to your old home if you are

The Fifth Wheel 65

assured of a welcome and restoration to favor ? " he asked,
with his courteous, royal smile.

" Do I look bughouse ? " answered Thomas. " Enough
of the footback life for me. But will they have me
again? The old lady is as fixed in her ways as a nut
on a new axle."

" My dear young man,'* said the other, " she has been
searching for you everywhere."

" Great! " said Thomas. " I'm on the job. That team
of dropsical dromedaries they call horses is a handicap
for a first-class coachman like myself; but I'll take the
job back, sure, doc. They're good people to be with."

And now a change came o'er the suave countenance of
the Caliph of Bagdad. He looked keenly and suspi-
ciously at the ex-coachman.

" May I ask what your name is ? " he said shortly.

"You've been looking for me," said Thomas, "and
don't know my name? You're a funny kind of sleuth.
You must be one of the Central Office gumshoers. I'm
Thomas McQuade, of course; and I've been chauffeur
of the Van Smuythe elephant team for a year. They fired
me a month ago for — well, doc, you saw what I did to
your old owl. I went broke on booze, and when I saw the
tire drop off your whiz wagon I was standing in that squad
of hoboes at the Worth monument waiting for a free bed.
Now, what's the prize for the best answer to all this?"

To his intense surprise Thomas felt himself lifted by

66 Strictly Business

the collar and dragged, without a word of explanation, to
the front door. This was opened, and he was kicked
forcibly down the steps with one hea^y, disillusionizing,
humiliating impact of the stupendous Arabian's shoe.

As soon as the ex-coachman had recovered his feet and
his wits he hastened as fast as he could eastward toward
Broadway.

"Crazy guy," was his estimate of the mysterious auto-
mobilist. "Just wanted to have some fun kiddin', I
guess. He might have dug up a dollar, anyhow. Now
I've got to hurry up and get back to that gang of bum bed
hunters before they all get preached to sleep."

When Thomas reached the end of his two-mile walk
he found the ranks of the homeless reduced to a squad
of perhaps eight or ten. He took the proper place of a
newcomer at the left end of the rear rank. In the file in
front of him was the young man who had spoken to him
of hospitals and something of a wife and child.

"Sorry to see you back again," said the young man,
turning to speak to him. "I hoped you had struck some-
thing better than this."

"Me?" said Thomas. "Oh, I just took a run around
the block to keep warm! I see the public ain't lending
to the Lord very fast to-night."

"In this kind of weather," said the young man, "charity
avails itself of the proverb, and both begins and ends at
home."

The Fifth Wheel 67

And now the Preacher and his vehement lieutenant
struck up a last hymn of petition to Providence and man.
Those of the Bed Liners whose windpipes still registered
above 32 degrees hopelessly and tunelessly joined in.

In the middle of the second verse Thomas saw a sturdy
girl with wind-tossed drapery battling against the breeze
and coming straight toward him from the opposite side-
walk. "Annie!" he yelled, and ran toward her.

"You fool, you fool!" she cried, weeping and laughing,
and hanging upon his neck, "why did you do \i?''

"The Stuff," explained Thomas briefly. "You know.
But subsequently nit. Not a drop." He led her to the
curb. "How did you happen to see me?"

"I came to find you," said Annie, holding tight to his
sleeve. "Oh, you big fool! Professor Cherubusco told
us that we might find you here."

"Professor Ch — Don't know the guy. What saloon
does he work in.?"

"He's a clearvoyant, Thomas; the greatest in the
world. He found you with the Chaldean telescope, he
said."

"He's a liar," said Thomas. "I never had it. He
never saw me have anybody's telescope."

"And he said you came in a chariot with five wheels or
something."

"Annie," said Thomas solicitously, "you're giving me
the wheels now. If I had a chariot I'd have gone to bed

68 Strictly Business

in it long ago. And without any singing and preaching
for a nightcap, either."

"Listen, you big fool. The Missis says she'll take you
back. I begged her to. But you must behave. And
you can go up to the house to-night; and your old room
over the stable is ready."

" Great ! " said Thomas earnestly. " You are It, Annie.
But when did these stunts happen?"

"To-night at Professor Cherubusco*s. He sent his
automobile for the Missis, and she took me along. I've
been there with her before."

"What's the professor's line?"

"He's a clearvoyant and a witch. The Missis consults
him. He knows everything. But he hasn't done the
Missis any good yet, though she's paid him hundreds of
dollars. But he told us that the stars told him we could
find you here."

'* What's the old lady want this cherry-buster to do?'*

"That's a family secret," said Annie. "And now
you've asked enough questions. Come on home, you
big fool."

They had moved but a little way up the street when
Thomas stopped.

"Got any dough with you, Annie?" he asked.

Annie looked at him sharply.

"Oh, I know what that look means," said Thomas.
"You're wrong. Not another drop. But there's a guy

The Fifth Wheel 69

that was standing next to me in the bed line over there
that's in a bad shape. He's the right kind, and he's got
wives or kids or something, and he's on the sick list. No
booze. If you could dig up half a dollar for him so he
could get a decent bed I'd like it."

Annie's fingers began to wiggle in her purse.

"Sure, I've got money," said she. " Lots of it. Twelve
dollars." And then she added, with woman's ineradicable
suspicion of vicarious benevolence: "Bring him here and
let me see him first."

Thomas went on his mission. The wan Bed Liner
came readily enough. As the two drew near, Annie
looked up from her purse and screamed:

"Mr. Walter— Oh — Mr. Walter!"

"Is that you, Annie ?" said the young man weakly.

"Oh, Mr. Walter! — and the Missis hunting high and
low for you!"

"Does mother want to see me ?" he asked, with a flush
coming out on his pale cheek.

"She's been hunting for you high and low. Sure, she
wants to see you. She wants you to come home. She's
tried police and morgues and lawyers and advertising and
detectives and rewards and everj^thing. And then she
took up clearvoyants. You'll go right home, won't you,
Mr. Walter?"

"Gladly, if she wants me," said the young man.
"Three years is a long time. I suppose I'll have to walk

70 Strictly Business

up, though, unless the street cars are giving free rides. I
used to walk and beat that old plug team of bays we used
to drive to the carriage. Have they got them yet ? "

"They have," said Thomas, feelingly. "And they'll
have 'em ten years from now. The life of the royal
elephantibus truckhorseibus is one hundred and forty-nine
years. I'm the coachman. Just got my reappointment
five minutes ago. Let's all ride up in a surface car —
that is — er — if Annie will pay the fares."

On the Broadway car Annie handed each one of the
prodigals a nickel to pay the conductor.

"Seems to me you are mighty reckless the way
you throw large sums of money around," said Thomas
sarcastically.

"In that purse," said Annie decidedly, "is exactly
$11.85. I shall take every cent of it to-morrow and give
it to Professor Cherubusco, the greatest man in the world."

"Well," said Thomas, "I guess he must be a pretty fly
guy to pipe off things the way he does. I'm glad his
spooks told him where you could find me. If you'll give
me his address, some day I'll go up there, myself, and shake
his hand."

Presently Thomas moved tentatively in his seat, and
thoughtfully felt an abrasion or two on his knees and
elbows.

"Say, Annie," said he confidentially, "maybe it's one
of the last dreams of the booze, but I've a kind of a recol-

The Fifth Wheel 71

lection of riding in an automobile with a swell guy that
took me to a house full of eagles and arc lights. He fed
me on biscuits and hot air, and then kicked me down the
front steps. If it was the d fs, why am I so sore ?"

"Shut up, you fool," said Annie.

**If I could find that funny guy's house," said Thomas,
in conclusion, "I'd go up there some day and punch his
nose for him."

VI

THE POET AND THE PEASANT

1 HE other day a poet friend of mine, who has lived in
close communion with nature all his life, wrote a poem
and took it to an editor.

It was a living pastoral, full of the genuine breath of the
fields, the song of birds, and the pleasant chatter of trick-
ling streams.

When the poet called again to see about it, with hopes of
a beefsteak dinner in his heart, it was handed back to him
with the comment:

''Too artificial."

Several of us met over spaghetti and Dutchess County
chianti, and swallowed indignation with the slippery
forkfuls.

And there we dug a pit for the editor. With us was
Conant, a well-arrived writer of fiction — a man who had
trod on asphalt all his life, and who had never looked upon
bucolic scenes except with sensations of disgust from the
windows of express trains.

Conant wrote a poem and called it " The Doe and the
Brook." It was a fine specimen of the kind of work you

72

The Poet and the Peasant 73

would expect from a poet who had strayed with Amaryllis
only as far as the florist's windows, and whose sole orni-
thological discussion had been carried on with a waiter.
Conant signed this poem, and we sent it to the same editor.

But this has very little to do with the story.

Just as the editor was reading the first line of the poem,
on the next morning, a being stumbled off the West Shore
ferrj^boat, and loped slowly up Forty-second Street.

The invader was a young man with light blue eyes,
a hanging lip and hair the exact color of the little orphan's
(afterward discovered to be the earl's daughter) in one of
Mr. Blaney's plays. His trousers were corduroy, his coat
short-sleeved, with buttons in the middle of his back. One
bootleg was outside the corduroys. You looked expec-
tantly, though in vain, at his straw hat for ear holes, its
shape inaugurating the suspicion that it had been ravaged
from a former equine possessor. In his hand was a valise
— description of it is an impossible task; a Boston man
would not have carried his lunch and law books to his
office in it. And above one ear, in his hair, was a wisp
of hay — the rustic's letter of credit, his badge of inno-
cence, the last clinging touch of the Garden of Eden linger-
ing to shame the gold -brick men.

Knowingly, smilingly, the city crowds passed him by.
They saw the raw stranger stand in the gutter and stretch
his neck at the tall buildings. At this they ceased to smile,
and even to look at him. It had been done so often. A

74 Strictly Business

few glanced at the antique valise to see what Coney ** attrac-
tion " or brand of chewing gum he might be thus dinning
into his memory. But for the most part he was ignored.
Even the newsboys looked bored when he scampered like
a circus clown out of the way of cabs and street cars.

At Eighth Avenue stood "Bunco Harry," with his dyed
mustache and shiny, good-natured eyes. Harry was too
good an artist not to be pained at the sight of an actor
overdoing his part. He edged up to the countryman, who
had stopped to open his mouth at a jewelry store window,
and shook his head.

"Too thick, pal," he said, critically — "too thick by a
couple of inches. I don't know what your lay is; but
you've got the properties on too thick. That hay, now —
why, they don't even allow that on Proctor's circuit
any more."

"I don't understand you, mister," said the green one.
*' I'm not lookin' for any circus. I've just run down from
Ulster County to look at the town, bein' that the hay in 's
over with. Gosh! but it's a whopper. I thought Pough-
keepsie was some punkins ; but this here town is five times
as big."

"Oh, well," said "Bunco Harry," raising his eyebrows,
**I didn't mean to butt in. You don't have to tell. I
thought you olight to tone down a little, so I tried to put
you wise. Wish you success at your graft, whatever it is.
Come and have a drink, anyhow."

The Poet and the Peasant 75

" I wouldn't mind having a glass of lager beer," acknow-
ledged the other.

They went to a cafe frequented by men with smooth
faces and shifty eyes, and sat at their drinks.

"I'm glad I come across you, mister," said Haylocks.
" How'd you like to play a game or two of seven-up ? I've
got the keerds."

He fished them out of Noah's valise — a rare, inimitable
deck, greasy with bacon suppers and grimy with the soil
of cornfields.

" Bunco Harry " laughed loud and briefly.

"Not for me, sport," he said, firmly. "I don't go
against that make-up of yours for a cent. But I still say
you've overdone it. The Reubs haven't dressed like that
since '79. I doubt if you could work Brooklyn for a key-
winding watch with that layout."

" Oh, you needn't think I ain't got the money," boasted
Haylocks. He drew forth a tightly rolled mass of bills
as large as a teacup, and laid it on the table.

" Got that for my share of grandmother's farm," he
announced. "There's $950 in that roll. Thought I'd
come to the city and look around for a likely business to
go into."

" Bunco Harry" took up the roll of money and looked
at it with almost respect in his smiling eyes.

"I've seen worse," he said, critically. "But you'll
never do it in them clothes. You want to get light tan

76 Strictly Business

shoes and a black suit and a straw hat with a colored band,
and talk a good deal about Pittsburg and freight differ-
entials, and drink sherry for breakfast in order to work off
phony stuff like that."

** What's his line?" asked two or three shifty-eyed
men of "Bunco Harry" after Haylocks had gathered up
his impugned money and departed.

"The queer, I guess," said Harry. "Or else he's one
of Jerome's men. Or some guy with a new graft. He's
too much hayseed. Maybe that his — I wonder now —
oh, no, it couldn't have been real money."

Haylocks wandered on. Thirst probably assailed him
again, for he dived into a dark groggery on a side street
and bought beer. Several sinister fellows hung upon
one end of the bar. At first sight of him their eyes bright-
ened; but when his insistent and exaggerated rusticity
became apparent their expressions changed to wary
suspicion.

Haylocks swung his valise across the bar.

"Keep that a while for me, mister," he said, chewing
at the end of a virulent claybank cigar. "I'll be back
after I knock around a spell. And keep your eye on it,
for there's $950 inside of it, though maybe you wouldn't
think so to look at me."

Somewhere outside a phonograph struck up a band
piece, and Haylocks was off for it, his coat-tail buttons
flopping in the middle of his back.

The Poet and the Peasant 77

**Divvy, Mike," said the men hanging upon the bar,
winking openly at one another.

"Honest, now," said the bartender, kicking the vaHse
to one side. ''You don't think I'd fall to that, do you?
Anybody can see he ain't no jay. One of McAdoo's
come-on squad, I guess. He's a shine if he made himself
up. There ain't no parts of the country now where they
dress like that since they run rural free delivery to Provi-
dence, Rhode Island. If he's got nine-fifty in that valise
it's a ninety-eight cent Waterbury that's stopped at ten
minutes to ten."

When Haylocks had exhausted the resources of Mr.
Edison to amuse he returned for his valise. And then
down Broadway he gallivanted, culling the sights w^ith
his eager blue eyes. But still and evermore Broadway
rejected him with curt glances and sardonic smiles. He
was the oldest of the "gags" that the city must endure.
He was so flagrantly impossible, so ultra rustic, so exag-
gerated beyond the most freakish products of the barn-
yard, the hayfield and the vaudeville stage, that he excited
only w^eariness and suspicion. And the wisp of hay in
his hair was so genuine, so fresh and redolent of the
meadows, so clamorously rural that even a shell-game
man would have put up his peas and folded his table at
the sight of it.

Haylocks seated himself upon a flight of stone steps
and once more exhumed his roll of yellow-backs from the

78 Strictly Business

valise. The outer one, a twenty, he shucked off and
beckoned to a newsboy.

"Son," said he, "run somewhere and get this changed
for me. I'm mighty nigh out of chicken feed. I guess
you'll get a nickel if you'll hurry up."

A hurt look appeared through the dirt on the
newsy's face.

"Aw, watchert'ink! G'wan and get yer funny bill
changed yerself. Dey ain't no farm clothes yer got on.
G'wan wit yer stage money."

On a corner lounged a keen-eyed steerer for a gambling-
house. He saw Haylocks, and his expression suddenly
grew cold and virtuous.

"Mister," said the rural one. "I've heard of places
in this here town where a fellow could have a good game
of old sledge or peg a card at keno. I got $950 in this
valise, and I come down from old Ulster to see the sights.
Know where a fellow could get action on about $9 or $10 .?
I'm goin' to have some sport, and then maybe I'll buy
out a business of some kind."

The steerer looked pained, and investigated a white
speck on his left forefinger nail.

"Cheese it, old man," he murmured, reproachfully.
"The Central Office must be bughouse to send you out
looking like such a gillie. You couldn't get within two
blocks of a sidewalk crap game in them Tony Pastor
props. The recent Mr. Scotty from Death Valley has

The Poet and the Peasant 79

got you beat a crosstown block in the way of Elizabethan
scenery and mechanical accessories. Let it be skiddoo
for yours. Nay, I know of no gilded halls where one may
bet a patrol wagon on the ace."

Rebuffed again by the great city that is so swift to detect
artificialities, Haylocks sat upon the curb and presented
his thoughts to hold a conference.

"It's my clothes," said he; "durned if it ain't. They
think I'm a hayseed and won't have nothin' to do with me.
Nobody never made fun of this hat in Ulster County. I
guess if you want folks to notice you in New York you
must dress up like they do."

So Haylocks went shopping in the bazaars where men
spake through their noses and rubbed their hands and ran
the tape line ecstatically over the bulge in his inside pocket
where reposed a red nubbin of corn with an even number
of rows. And messengers bearing parcels and boxes
streamed to his hotel on Broadway within the lights of
Long Acre.

At 9 o'clock in the evening one descended to the side-
walk whom Ulster County would have foresworn. Bright
tan were his shoes; his hat the latest block. His light
gray trousers were deeply creased; a gay blue silk hand-
kerchief flapped from the breast pocket of his elegant
English walking coat. His collar might have graced a
laundry window; his blond hair was trimmed close; the
wisp of hay was gone.

80 Strictly Business

For an instant he stood, resplendent, with the leisurely
air of a boulevard ier concocting in his mind the route for
his evening pleasures. And then he turned down the gay,
bright street with the easy and graceful tread of a
millionaire.

But in the instant that he had paused the wisest and
keenest eyes in the city had enveloped him in their field
of vision. A stout man with gray eyes picked two of his
friends with a lift of his eyebrows from the row of loungers
in front of the hotel.

"The juiciest jay I've seen in six months," said the
man with gray eyes. "Come along."

It was half-past eleven when a man galloped into the
West Forty-seventh Street Police Station with the story
of his wrongs.

"Nine hundred and fifty dollars," he gasped, "all my
share of grandmother's farm."

The desk sergeant wrung from him the name Jabez
Bulltongue, of Locust Valley farm, Ulster County, and
then began to take descriptions of the strong-arm
gentlemen.

When Conant went to see the editor about the fate of
his poem, he was received over the head of the office boy
into the inner office that is decorated with the statuettes
by Rodin and J. G. Brown.

"When I read the first line of *The Doe and the
Brook/ " said the editor, " I knew it to be the work of

The Poet and the Peasant 81

one whose life has been heart to heart with Nature. The
finished art of the Hne did not bhnd me to that fact. To
use a somewhat homely comparison, it was as if a wild,
free child of the woods and fields were to don the garb
of fashion and walk down Broadway. Beneath the
apparel the man would show."

** Thanks," said Conant. "I suppose the check will
be round on Thursday, as usual."

The morals of this story have somehow gotten mixed.
You can take your choice of "Stay on the Farm" or
"Don't Write Poetry."

VII

THE ROBE OF PEACE

Mysteries follow one another so closely in a great
city that the reading public and the friends of Johnny
Bellchambers have ceased to marvel at his sudden and
unexplained disappearance nearly a year ago. This par-
ticular mystery has now been cleared up, but the solution
is so strange and incredible to the mind of the average
man that only a select few who were in close touch with
Bellchambers will give it full credence.

Johnny Bellchambers, as is well known, belonged to
the intrinsically inner circle of the elite. Without any of
the ostentation of the fashionable ones who endeavor to
attract notice by eccentric display of wealth and show,
he still was au fait in everything that gave deserved lustre
to his high position in the ranks of society.

Especially did he shine in the matter of dress. In this
he was the despair of imitators. Always correct,
exquisitely groomed, and possessed of an unlimited ward-
robe, he was conceded to be the best-dressed man in New
York, and, therefore, in America. There was not a tailor
in Gotham who would not have deemed it a precious boon

82

The Robe of Peace 83

to have been granted the privilege of making Bellchambers'
clothes without a cent of pay. As he wore them, they
would have been a priceless advertisement. Trousers
were his especial passion. Here nothing but perfection
would he notice. He would have worn a patch as quickly
as he would have overlooked a wrinkle. He kept a
man in his apartments always busy pressing his ample
supply. His friends said that three hours was the
limit of time that he would wear these garments without
exchanging.

Bellchambers disappeared very suddenly. For three
days his absence brought no alarm to his friends, and
then they began to operate the usual methods of inquiry.
All of them failed. He had left absolutely no trace behind.
Then the search for a motive was instituted, but none was
found. He had no enemies, he had no debts, there was
no woman. There were several thousand dollars in his
bank to his credit. He had never showed any tendency
toward mental eccentricity; in fact, he was of a par-
ticularly calm and well-balanced temperament. Every
means of tracing the vanished man was made use of, but
without avail. It was one of those cases — more numer-
ous in late years — where men seem to have gone out like
the flame of a candle, leaving not even a trail of smoke as
a witness.

In May, Tom Eyres and Lancelot Gilliam, two of
Bellchambers* old friends, went for a little run on the

84 Strictly Business

other side. While pottering around in Italy and Switzer-
land, they happened, one day, to hear of a monastery in
the Swiss Alps that promised something outside of the
ordinary tourist-beguiling attractions. The monastery
was almost inaccessible to the average sightseer, being
on an extremely rugged and precipitous spur of the
mountains. The attractions it possessed but did not
advertise were, first, an exclusive and divine cordial made
by the monks that was said to far surpass benedictine and
chartreuse. Next a huge brass bell so purely and
accurately cast that it had not ceased sounding since it
was first rung three hundred years ago. Finally, it was
asserted that no Englishman had ever set foot within its
walls. Eyres and Gilliam decided that these three reports
called for investigation.

It took them two days with the aid of two guides to
reach the monastery of St. Gondrau. It stood upon a
frozen, wind-swept crag with the snow piled about it in
treacherous, drifting masses. They were hospitably
received by the brothers whose duty it was to entertain
the infrequent guest. They drank of the precious cordial,
finding it rarely potent and reviving. They listened to
the great, ever-echoing bell, and learned that they were
pioneer travelers, in those gray stone walls, over the Eng-
lishman whose restless feet have trodden nearly every
corner of the earth.

At three o'clock on the afternoon they arrived, the two

The Robe of Peace 85

young Gothamites stood with good Brother Cristofer in
the great, cold hallway of the monastery to watch the
monks march past on their way to the refectory. They
came slowly, pacing by twos, with their heads bowed,
treading noiselessly with sandaled feet upon the rough
stone flags. As the procession slowly filed past. Eyres
suddenly gripped Gilliam by the arm. "Look," he
whispered, eagerly, "at the one just opposite you now —
the one on this side, with his hand at his waist — if that
isn't Johnny Bellchambers then I never saw him!"

Gilliam saw and recognized the lost glass of fashion.

"What the deuce," said he, wonderingly, "is old Bell
doing here? Tommy, it surely can't be he! Never
heard of Bell having a turn for the religious. Fact is,
I've heard him say things when a four-in-hand didn't
seem to tie up just right that would bring him up for
court-martial before any church."

"It's Bell, without a doubt," said Eyres, firmly, "or
I'm pretty badly in need of an oculist. But think of
Johnny Bellchambers, the Royal High Chancellor of
swell togs and the Mahatma of pink teas, up here in cold
storage doing penance in a snuff-colored bathrobe! I
can't get it straight in my mind. Let's ask the jolly old
boy that's doing the honors."

Brother Cristofer was appealed to for information. By
that time the monks had passed into the refectory. He
could not tell to which one they referred. Bellchambers ?

86 Strictly Business

Ah, the brothers of St. Gondrau abandoned their worldly
names when they took the vows. Did the gentlemen
wish to speak with one of the brothers ? If they would
come to the refectory and indicate the one they wished to
see, the reverend abbot in authority would, doubtless,
permit it.

Eyres and Gilliam went into the dining hall and pointed
out to Brother Cristofer the man they had seen. Yes, it
was Johnny Bellchambers. They saw his face plainly
now, as he sat among the dingy brothers, never looking
up, eating broth from a coarse, brown bowl.

Permission to speak to one of the brothers was granted
to the two travelers by the abbot, and they waited in a
reception room for him to come. When he did come,
treading softly in his sandals, both Eyres and Gilliam
looked at him in perplexity and astonishment. It was
Johnny Bellchambers, but he had a different look. Upon
his smooth-shaven face was an expression of ineffable
peace, of rapturous attainment, of perfect and complete
happiness. His form was proudly erect, his eyes shone
with a serene and gracious light. He was as neat and
well-groomed as in the old New York days, but how
differently was he clad! Now he seemed clothed in but
a single garment — a long robe of rough brown cloth,
gathered by a cord at the waist, and falling in straight,
loose folds nearly to his feet. He shook hands with his
visitors with his old ease and grace of manner. If there

The Robe of Peace 87

was any embarrassment in that meeting it was not mani-
fested by Johnny Bellchambers. The room had no seats;
they stood to converse.

"Glad to see you, old man," said Eyres, somewhat
awkwardly. "Wasn't expecting to find you up here.
Not a bad idea, though, after all. Society's an awlFul
sham. Must be a relief to shake the giddy whirl and
retire to — er — contemplation and — er — prayer and
hymns, and those things."

*'Oh, cut that, Tommy," said Bellchambers, cheerfully.
"Don't be afraid that I'll pass around the plate. I go
through these thing-um-bobs with the rest of these old
boys because they are the rules. I'm Brother Ambrose
here, you know. I'm given just ten minutes to talk to
you fellows. That's rather a new design in waistcoats
you have on, isn't it, Gilliam.? Are they wearing those
things on Broadway now?"

"It's the same old Johnny," said Gilliam, joyfully.

"WTiat the devil — I mean why Oh, confound it!

what did you do it for, old man?"

"Peel the bathrobe," pleaded Eyres, almost tearfully,
"and go back with us. The old crowd'll go wild to see
you. This isn't in your line, Bell. I know half a
dozen girls that wore the willow on the quiet when
you shook us in that unaccountable way. Hand in
your resignation, or get a dispensation, or whatever
you have to do to get a release from this ice factory.

88 Strictly Business

You'll get catarrh here, Johnny — and My God!

you haven't any socks on!"

Bellchambers looked down at his sandaled feet and
smiled.

"You fellows don't understand," he said, soothingly.
"It's nice of you to want me to go back, but the old life
will never know me again. I have reached here the goal
of all my ambitions. I am entirely happy and contented.
Here I shall remain for the remainder of my days. You
see this robe that I wear?" Bellchambers caressingly
touched the straight-hanging garment: "At last I have
found something that will not bag at the knees. I have
attained "

At that moment the deep boom of the great brass bell
reverberated through the monastery. It must have been
a summons to immediate devotions, for Brother Ambrose
bowed his head, turned and left the chamber without
another word. A slight wave of his hand as he passed
through the stone doorway seemed to say a farewell to
his old friends. They left the monastery without see-
ing him again.

And this is the story that Tommy Eyres and Lancelot
Gilliam brought back with them from their latest Euro-
pean tour.

VIII

THE GIRL AND THE GRAFT

The other day I ran across my old friend Ferguson
Pogue. Pogue is a conscientious grafter of the highest
type. His headquarters is the Western Hemisphere, and
his line of business is anything from speculating in town
lots on the Great Staked Plains to selling wooden toys
in Connecticut, made by hydraulic pressure from nutmegs
ground to a pulp.

Now and then when Pogue has made a good haul he
comes to New York for a rest. He says the jug of wine
and loaf of bread and Thou in the wilderness business is
about as much rest and pleasure to him as sliding down
the bumps at Coney would be to President Taft. " Give
me," says Pogue, "a big city for my vacation. Espe-
cially New York. I'm not much fond of New Yorkers,
and Manhattan is about the only place on the globe where
I don't find any."

While in the metropolis Pogue can always be found at
one of two places. One is a little second-hand bookshop
on Fourth Avenue, where he reads books about his hob-
bies, Mahomeianism and taxidermy. I found him at the

90 Strictly Business

other — his hall bedroom in Eighteenth Street — where
he sat in his stocking feet trying to pluck "The Banks of
the Wabash" out of a small zither. Four years he has
practised this tune without arriving near enough to cast
the longest trout line to the water's edge. On the dresser
lay a blued-steel Colt's forty-five and a tight roll of tens
and twenties large enough around to belong to the spring
rattlesnake-story class. A chambermaid with a room-
cleaning air fluttered nearby in the hall, unable to enter
or to flee, scandalized by the stocking feet, aghast at the
Colt's, yet powerless, with her metropolitan instincts,
to remove herself beyond the magic influence of the
yellow-hued roll.

I sat on his trunk while Ferguson Pogue talked. No
one could be franker or more candid in his conversation.
Beside his expression the cry of Henry James for lacteal
nourishment at the age of one month would have seemed
like a Chaldean cryptogram. He told me stories of his
profession with pride, for he considered it an art. And I
was curious enough to ask him whether he had known
any women who followed it.

"Ladies ?" said Pogue, with Western chivalry. "Well,
not to any great extent. They don't amount to much in
special lines of graft, because they're all so busy in general
lines. What ? Why, they have to. Who's got the money
in the world ? The men. Did you ever know a man to
give a woman a dollar without any consideration? A

The Girl and the Graft 91

man will shell out his dust to another man free and easy
and gratis. But if he drops a penny in one of the machines
run by the Madam Eve's Daughters' Amalgamated
Association and the pineapple chewing gum don't fall out
when he pulls the lever you can hear him kick to the super-
intendent four blocks away. Man is the hardest
proposition a woman has to go up against. He's a low-
grade one, and she has to work overtime to make him pay.
Two times out of five she's salted. She can't put in
crushers and costly machinery. He'd notice 'em and
be onto the game. They have to pan out what they get,
and it hurts their tender hands. Some of 'em are natural
sluice troughs and can carry out $1,000 to the ton. The
dry-eyed ones have to depend on signed letters, false hair,
sympathy, the kangaroo walk, cowhide whips, ability
to cook, sentimental juries, conversational powers, silk
underskirts, ancestry, rouge, anonymous letters, violet
sachet powders, witnesses, revolvers, pneumatic forms,
carbolic acid, moonlight, cold cream and the evening
newspapers."

**You are outrageous, Ferg," I said. "Surely there is
none of this * graft,' as you call it, in a perfect and har-
monious matrimonial union!"

"Well," said Pogue, "nothing that would justify you
every time in calling up Police Headquarters and ordering
out the reserves and a vaudeville manager on a dead
run. But it's this way: Suppose you're a Fifth Avenue

92 Strictly Business

millionaire, soaring high, on the right side of copper
and cappers.

"You come home at night and bring a $9,000,000 dia-
mond brooch to the lady who's staked you for a claim.
You hand it over. She says, *Oh, George!' and looks
to see if it's backed. She comes up and kisses you.
You've waited for it. You get it. All right. It's graft.

"But I'm telling you about Artemisia Blye. She was
from Kansas and she suggested corn in all of its phases.
Her hair was as yellow as the silk; her form was as tall
and graceful as a stalk in the low grounds during a wet
summer; her eyes were as big and startling as bunions,
and green was her favorite color.

" On my last trip into the cool recesses of your seques>
tered city I met a human named Vau cross. He was
worth — that is, he had a million. He told me he was in
business on the street. *A sidewalk merchant?' says I,
sarcastic. 'Exactly,' says he. 'Senior partner of a
paving concern.'

**I kind of took to him. For this reason, I met him
on Broadway one night when I was out of heart, luck,
tobacco and place. He was all silk hat, diamonds and
front. He was all front. If you had gone behind him
you would have only looked yourself in the face. I
looked like a cross between Count Tolstoy and a June
lobster. I was out of luck. I had — but let me lay my
eyes on that dealer again.

The Girl and the Graft 93

"Vaucross stopped and talked to me a few minutes
and then he took me to a high-toned restaurant to eat
dinner. There was music, and then some Beethoven,
and Bordelaise sauce, and cussing in French, and frangi-
pangi, and some hauteur and cigarettes. When I am
flush I know them places.

"I declare, I must have looked as bad as a mag-
azine artist sitting there without any money and my
hair all rumpled like I was booked to read a chapter
from 'Elsie's School Days' at a Brooklyn Bohemian
smoker. But Vaucross treated me like a bear hunter's
guide. He wasn't afraid of hurting the waiter's
feelings.

"*Mr. Pogue,' he explains to me, *I am using you.'
"* Go on,' says I; * I hope you don't wake up.'
"And then he tells me, you know, the kind of man he
was. He was a New Yorker. His whole ambition was
to be noticed. He wanted to be conspicuous. He
wanted people to point him out and bow to him, and tell
others who he was. He said it had been the desire of his
life always. He didn't have but a million, so he couldn't
attract attention by spending money. He said he tried
to get into public notice one time by planting a little
public square on the east side with garlic for free use of
the poor; but Carnegie heard of it, and covered it over
at once with a library in the Gaelic language. Three
times he had jumped in the way of automobiles; but the

94 Strictly Business

only result was five broken ribs and a notice in the papers
that an unknown man, five feet ten, with four amalgam-
filled teeth, supposed to be the last of the famous Red
Leary gang had been run over.

"'Ever try the reporters?' I asked him.

"'Last month,' says Mr. Vaucross, 'my expenditure
for lunches to reporters was $124.80.'

" ' Get anything out of that V I asks.

"'That reminds me,' says he; 'add $8.50 for pepsin.
Yes, I got indigestion.'

" ' How am I supposed to push along your scramble for
prominence ?' I inquires. ' Contrast ? '

" ' Something of that sort to-night,' says Vaucross. * It
grieves me; but I am forced to resort to eccentricity.'
And here he drops his napkin in his soup and rises up and
bows to a gent who is devastating a potato under a palm
across the room.

" ' The Police Commissioner,' says my climber, gratified.
"'Friend,' says I, in a hurry, 'have ambitions but don't
kick a rung out of your ladder. When you use me as a
stepping stone to salute the police you spoil my appetite
on the grounds that I may be degraded and incriminated.
Be thoughtful.'

" At the Quaker City squab en casserole the idea about
Artemisia Blye comes to me.

" ' Suppose I can manage to get you in the papers,' says
I — 'a column or two every day in all of 'em and your

The Girl and the Graft 95

picture in most of 'em for a week. How much would
it be worth to you ?'

"*Ten thousand dollars,' says Vaucross, warm in a
minute. *But no murder,' says he; *and I won't wear
pink pants at a cotillon.'

"'I wouldn't ask you to,' says I. 'This is honorable,
stylish and uneffeminate. Tell the waiter to bring a
demi tasse and some other beans, and I will disclose to
you the opus moderandi.'

"We closed the deal an hour later in the rococo rouge
et noise room. I telegraphed that night to Miss Artemisia
in Salina. She took a couple of photographs and an
autograph letter to an elder in the Fourth Presbyterian
Church in the morning, and got some transportation and
$80. She stopped in Topeka long enough to trade a
flashlight interior and a valentine to the vice-president of
a trust company for a mileage book and a package of
five-dollar notes with $250 scrawled on the band.

" The fifth evening after she got my wire she was waiting,
all d^colletee and dressed up, for me and Vaucross to take
her to dinner in one of these New York feminine apart-
ment houses where a man can't get in unless he plays
bezique and smokes depilatory powder cigarettes.

"'She's a stunner,' says Vaucross when he saw her.
* They'll give her a two-column cut sure.'

"This was the scheme the three of us concocted. It
was business straight through. Vaucross was to rush

96 Strictly Business

Miss Blye with all the style and display and emotion he
could for a month. Of course, that amounted to nothing
as far as his ambitions were concerned. The sight of a
man in a white tie and patent leather pumps pouring
greenbacks through the large end of a cornucopia to pur-
chase nutriment and heartsease for tall, willowy blondes
in New York is as common a sight as blue turtles in
delirium tremens. But he was to write her love letters —
the worst kind of love letters, such as your wife publishes
after you are dead — every day. At the end of the month
he was to drop her, and she would bring suit for $100,000
for breach of promise.

"Miss Artemisia was to get $10,000. If she won the
suit that was all ; and if she lost she was to get it anyhow.
There was a signed contract to that effect.

"Sometimes they had me out with 'em, but not often.
I couldn't keep up to their style. She used to pull out
his notes and criticize them like bills of lading.

" * Say, you !' she'd say. ' What do you call this —
Letter to a Hardware Merchant from His Nephew on
Learning that His Aunt Has Nettlerash.^ You Eastern
duffers know as much about writing love letters as a
Kansas grasshopper does about tugboats. " My dear
Miss Blye!" — wouldn't that put pink icing and a little
red sugar bird on your bridal cake ? How long do you
expect to hold an audience in a court-room with that
kind of stuff? You want to get down to business, and

The Girl and the Graft 97

call me "Tweedlums Babe" and "Honeysuckle," and
sign yourself "Mama's Own Big Bad Puggy Wuggy
Boy " if you want any limelight to concentrate upon your
sparse gray hairs. Get sappy.'

"After that Vaucross dipped his pen in the indelible
tabasco. His notes read like something or other in the
original. I could see a jury sitting up, and women tear-
ing one another's hats to hear 'em read. And I could see
piling up for Mr. Vaucross as much notoriousness as
Archbishop Cranmer or the Brooklyn Bridge or cheese-
on-salad ever enjoyed. He seemed mighty pleased at
the prospects.

"They agreed on a night; and I stood on Fifth Avenue
outside a solemn restaurant and watched 'em. A process-
server walked in and handed Vaucross the papers at his
table. Ever}^body looked at 'em ; and he looked as proud
as Cicero. I went back to my room and lit a five-cent
cigar, for I knew the $10,000 was as good as ours.

" About two hours later somebody knocked at my door.
There stood Vaucross and Miss Artemisia, and she was
clinging — yes, sir, clinging — to his arm. And they
tells me they'd been out and got married. And they
articulated some trivial cadences about love and such.
And they laid down a bundle on the table and said ' Good
night' and left.

"And that's why I say," concluded Ferguson Pogue,
"that a woman is too busy occupied with her natural

98 Strictly Business

vocation and instinct of graft such as is given her for
self-preservation and amusement to make any great
success in special lines."

"What was in the bundle that they left?" I asked,
with my usual curiosity.

" Why," said Ferguson, " there was a scalper's railroad
ticket as far as Kansas City and two pairs of Mr.
Vaucross's old pants."

IX

THE CALL OF THE TAME

When the inauguration was accomplished — the pro-
ceedings were made smooth by the presence of the
Rough Riders — it is well known that a herd of those
competent and loyal ex-warriors paid a visit to the big
city. The newspaper reporters dug out of their trunks
the old broad-brimmed hats and leather belts that they
wear to North Beach fish fries, and mixed with the visitors.
No damage was done beyond the employment of the
wonderful plural " tend erf eet *' in each of the scribe's
stories. The Westerners mildly contemplated the sky-
scrapers as high as the third story, yawned at Broadway,
hunched down in the big chairs in hotel corridors, and
altogether looked as bored and dejected as a member of
Ye Ancient and Honorable Artillery separated during a
sham battle from his valet.

Out of this sightseeing delegation of good King Teddy's
Gentlemen of the Royal Bear-hounds dropped one Green-
brier Nye, of Pin Feather, Ariz.

The daily cyclone of Sixth Avenue's rush hour swept
him away from the company of his pardners true. The

99

100 Strictly Business

dust from a thousand rustling skirts filled his eyes. The
mighty roar of trains rushing across the sky deafened him.
The lightning-flash of twice ten hundred beaming eyes
confused his vision.

The storm was so sudden and tremendous that Green-
brier's first impulse was to lie down and grab a root. And
then he remembered that the disturbance was human,
and not elemental; and he backed out of it with a grin
into a doorway.

The reporters had written that but for the wide-brimmed
hats the West was not visible upon these gauchos of the
North. Heaven sharpen their eyes! The suit of black
diagonal, wrinkled in impossible places; the bright blue
four-in-hand, factory tied; the low, turned-down collar,
pattern of the days of Seymour and Blair, white glazed
as the letters on the window of the open-day-and-night-
except-Sunday restaurants; the outcurve at the knees
from the saddle grip; the peculiar spread of the half-
closed right thumb and fingers from the stiff hold upon the
circling lasso; the deeply absorbed weather tan that the
hottest sun of Cape May can never equal; the seldom-
winking blue eyes that unconsciously divided the rushing
crowds into fours, as though they were being counted out
of a corral; the segregated loneliness and solemnity of
expression, as of an Emperor or of one whose horizons
have not intruded upon him nearer than a day's ride —
these brands of the West were set upon Greenbrier Nye.

The Call of the Tame 101

Oh, yes; he wore a broad-brimmed hat, gentle reader —
just like those the Madison Square Post Office mail
carriers wear when they go up to Bronx Park on Sunday
afternoons.

Suddenly Greenbrier Nye jumped into the drifting
herd of metropolitan cattle, seized upon a man, dragged
him out of the stream and gave him a buffet upon his
collarbone that sent him reeling against a wall.

The victim recovered his hat, with the angry look of
a New Yorker who has suffered an outrage and intends
to write to the Trib. about it. But he looked at his assail-
ant, and knew that the blow was in consideration of love
and affection after the manner of the West, which greets
its friends with contumely and uproar and pounding fists,
and receives its enemies in decorum and order, such as
the judicious placing of the welcoming bullet demands.

"Grod in the mountains ! " cried Greenbrier, holding fast
to the foreleg of his cull. " Can this be Longhorn Merritt ? '*

The other man was — oh, look on Broadway any day
for the pattern — business man — latest rolled-brim
derby — good barber, business, digestion and tailor.

''Greenbrier Nye!" he exclaimed, grasping the hand
that had smitten him. "My dear fellow! So glad to
see you! How did you come to — oh, to be sure — the
inaugural ceremonies — I remember you joined the Rough
Riders. You must come and have luncheon with me, of
course."

4

102 Strictly Business

Greenbrier pinned him sadly but firmly to the wall
with a hand the size, shape and color of a McClellan
saddle.

"Longy," he said, in a melancholy voice that dis-
turbed traffic, " what have they been doing to you ? You
act just like a citizen. They done made you into a inmate
of the city directory. You never made no such Johnny
Branch execration of yourself as that out on the Gila.
'Come and have lunching with me!' You never defined
grub by any such terms of reproach in them days."

"I've been living in New York seven years," said
Merritt. "It's been eight since we punched cows to-
gether in Old Man Garcia's outfit. Well, let's go to a
cafe, anyhow. It sounds good to hear it called *grub'
again."

They picked their way through the crowd to a hotel,
and drifted, as by a natural law, to the bar.

"Speak up," invited Greenbrier.

"A dry Martini," said Merritt.

"Oh, Lord!" cried Greenbrier; "and yet me and you
once saw the same pink Gila monsters crawling up the
walls of the same hotel in Canon Diablo! A dry — but
let that pass. Whiskey straight — and they're on you."

Merritt smiled, and paid.

They lunched in a small extension of the dining room
that connected with the cafe. Merritt dexterously
diverted his friend's choice, that hovered over ham and

The Call of the Tame 103

eggs, to a pur^e of celery, a salmon cutlet, a partridge pie
and a desirable salad.

"On the day," said Greenbrier, grieved and thunder-
ous, "when I can't hold but one drink before eating when
I meet a friend I ain't seen in eight years at a 2 by 4 table
in a thirty-cent town at 1 o'clock on the third day of the
week, I want nine broncos to kick me forty times over a
640-acre section of land. Get them statistics?"

** Right, old man," laughed Merritt. "Waiter, bring
an absinthe frapp^ and — what's yours, Greenbrier ? "

"Whiskey straight," mourned Nye. "Out of the neck
of a bottle you used to take it, Longy — straight out of
the neck of a bottle on a galloping pony — Arizona
redeye, not this ab — oh, what's the use ? They're
on you."

Merritt slipped the wine card under his glass.

"All right. I suppose you think I'm spoiled by the
city. I'm as good a Westerner as you are, Greenbrier;
but, somehow, I can't make up my mind to go back
out there. New York is comfortable — comfortable.
I make a good living, and I live it. No more wet blankets
and riding herd in snowstorms, and bacon and cold coffee,
and blowouts once in six months for me. I reckon I'll
hang out here in the future. We'll take in the theatre
to-night, Greenbrier, and after that we'll dine at "

" I'll tell you what you are, Merritt," said Greenbrier,
laying one elbow in his salad and the other in his butter.

104 Strictly Business

**You are a concentrated, effete, unconditional, short-
sleeved, gotch-eared Miss Sally Walker. God made you
perpendicular and suitable to ride straddle and use cuss
words in the original. Wherefore you have suffered his
handiwork to elapse by removing yourself to New York
and putting on little shoes tied with strings, and making
faces when you talk. I've seen you rope and tie a steer
in 42j. If you was to see one now you'd write to the
Police Commissioner about it. And these flapdoodle
drinks that you inoculate your system with — these little
essences of cowslip with acorns in 'em, and paregoric
flip — they ain't anyways in assent with the cordiality of
manhood. I hate to see you this way."

"Well, Greenbrier," said Merritt, with apology in
his tone, "in a way you are right. Sometimes I do feel
like I was being raised on the bottle. But, I tell you,
New York is comfortable — comfortable. There's some-
thing about it — the sights and the crowds, and the way
it changes every day, and the very air of it that seems to
tie a one-mile-long stake rope around a man's neck, with
the other end fastened somewhere about Thirty-fourth
Street. I don't know what it is."

"God knows," said Greenbrier sadly, "and I know.
The East has gobbled you up. You was venison, and
now you're veal. You put me in mind of a japonica in a
window. You've been signed, sealed and diskivered.
Requiescat in hoc signo. You make me thirsty."

The Call of the Tame 105

"A green chartreuse here," said Merritt to the waiter.

"Whiskey straight," sighed Greenbrier, "and they're
on you, you renegade of the round-ups."

" Guilty, with an appHcation for mercy," said Merritt.
"You don't know how it is, Greenbrier. It's so com-
fortable here that "

"Please loan me your smelling salts," pleaded Green-
brier. "If I hadn't seen you once bluff three bluffers
from Mazatzal City with an empty gun in Phoenix "

Greenbrier's voice died away in pure grief.

"Cigars!" he called harshly to the waiter, to hide his
emotion.

" A pack of Turkish cigarettes for mine," said Merritt.

"They're on you," chanted Greenbrier, struggling to
conceal his contempt.

At seven they dined in the Where-to-Dine-Well column.

That evening a galaxy had assembled there. Bright
shone the lights o'er fair women and br — let it go, any-
how — brave men. The orchestra played charmingly.
Hardly had a tip from a diner been placed in its hands
by a waiter when it would burst forth into soniferousness.
The more beer you contributed to it the more Meyerbeer
it gave you. Which is reciprocity.

Merritt put forth exertions on the dinner. Greenbrier
was his old friend, and he liked him. He persuaded him
to drink a cocktail.

"I take the horehound tea," said Greenbrier, "for

106 Strictly Business

old times* sake. But I'd prefer whiskey straight.
They're on you.'*

"Right!" said Merritt. "Now, run your eye down
that bill of fare and see if it seems to hitch on any
of the items."

"Lay me on my lava bed!" said Greenbrier, with
bulging eyes. "All these specimens of nutriment in the
grub wagon! What's this? Horse with the heaves? I
pass. But look along! Here's truck for twenty round-
ups all spelled out in different sections. Wait till I see.'*

The viands ordered, Merritt turned to the wine list.

"This Medoc isn't bad," he suggested.

"You're the doc," said Greenbrier. "I'd rather
have whiskey straight. It's on you."

Greenbrier looked around the room. The waiter
brought things and took dishes away. He was observing.
He saw a New York restaurant crowd enjoying itself.

"How was the range when you left the Gila?" asked
Merritt.

"Fine," said Greenbrier. "You see that lady in the
red speckled silk at that table? Well, she could warm
over her beans at my campfire. Yes, the range was
good. She looks as nice as a white mustang I see once
on Black River."

When the coffee came, Greenbrier put one foot on the
seat of the chair next to him.

" You said it was a comfortable town, Longy," he said.

The Gall of the Tame 107

meditatively. "Yes, it's a comfortable town. It's dif-
ferent from the plains in a blue norther. TVTiat did you
call that mess in the crock with the handle, Longy ? Oh,
yes, squabs in a cash roll. They're worth the roll. That
white mustang had just such a way of turning his head
and shaking his mane — look at her, Longy. If I thought
I could sell out my ranch at a fair price, I believe I'd

"Gyar — song!" he suddenly cried, in a voice that
paralyzed every knife and fork in the restaurant.

The waiter dived toward the table.

"Two more of them cocktail drinks," ordered Green-
brier.

Merritt looked at him and smiled significantly.

"They're on me," said Greenbrier, blowing a puff of
smoke to the ceiling.

THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY

The poet Longfellow — or was it Confucius, the inventor
of wisdom ? — remarked :

"Life is real, life is earnest;
And things are not what they seem.'*

As mathematics are — or is: thanks, old subscriber!
— the only just rule by which questions of life can be
measured, let us, by all means, adjust our theme to the
straight edge and the balanced column of the great god-
dess Two-and -Two-Makes-Four. Figures — unassail-
able sums in addition — shall be set over against what-
ever opposing element there may be.

A mathematician, after scanning the above two lines
of poetry, would say: "Ahem! young gentlemen, if we
assume that X plus — that is, that life is real — then
things (a31 of which life includes) are real. Anything
that is real is what it seems. Then if we consider the
proposition that *things are not what they seem,' why "

But this is heresy, and not poesy. We woo the
sweet nymph Algebra; we would conduct you into the

108

The Unknown Quantity 109

presence of the elusive, seductive, pursued, satisfying,
mysterious X.

Not long before the beginning of this century, Septimus
Kinsolving, an old New Yorker, invented an idea. He
originated the discovery that bread is made from flour
and not from wheat futures. Perceiving that the flour
crop was short, and that the Stock Exchange was having
no perceptible effect on the growing wheat, Mr. Kinsolving
cornered the flour market.

The result was that when you or my landlady (before
the war she never had to turn her hand to anything; South-
erners accommodated) bought a five-cent loaf of bread
you laid down an additional two cents, which went to Mr.
Kinsolving as a testimonial to his perspicacity.

A second result was that Mr. Kinsolving quit the game
with $2,000,000 prof — er — rake-off.

Mr. Kinsolving's son Dan was at college when the
mathematical experiment in bread stuffs was made. Dan
came home during vacation, and found the old gentleman
in a red dressing-gown reading "Little Dorrit" on the
porch of his estimable red brick mansion in Washington
Square. He had retired from business with enough extra
two-cent pieces from bread buyers to reach, if laid side
by side, fifteen times around the earth and lap as far as the
public debt of Paraguay.

Dan shook hands with his father, and hurried over to
Greenwich Village to see his old high-school friend.

110 Strictly Business

Kenwitz. Dan had always admired Kenwitz. Kenwitz was
pale, curly-haired, intense, serious, mathematical, studious,
altruistic, socialistic and the natural foe of oligarchies.
Kenwitz had foregone college, and was learning watch-
making in his father's jewelry store. Dan was smiling,
jovial, easy- tempered and tolerant alike of kings and
ragpickers. The two foregathered joyously, being oppo-
sites. And then Dan went back to college, and Kenwitz
to his mainsprings — and to his private library in the
rear of the jewelry shop.

Four years later Dan came back to Washington Square
with the accumulations of B. A. and two years of Europe
thick upon him. He took a filial look at Septimus Kin-
sol ving's elaborate tombstone in Greenwood, and a tedious
excursion through typewritten documents with the family
lawyer; and then, feeling himself a lonely and hopeless
millionaire, hurried down to the old jewelry store across
Sixth Avenue.

Kenwitz unscrewed a magnifying glass from his eye,
routed out his parent from a dingy rear room, and aban-
doned the interior of watches for outdoors. He went with
Dan, and they sat on a bench in Washington Square. Dan
had not changed much; he was stalwart, and had a
dignity that was inclined to relax into a grin. Kenwitz
was more serious, more intense, more learned, philosoph-
ical and socialistic.

" I know about it now," said Dan, finally. '* I pumped

The Unknown Quantity 111

it out of the eminent legal lights that turned over to me
poor old dad's collection of bonds and boodle. It amounts
to $2,000,000, Ken. And I am told that he squeezed it
out of the chaps that pay their pennies for loaves of bread
at the little bakeries around the corner. You've studied
economics, Dan, and you know all about monopolies, and
the masses, and octopuses, and the rights of laboring
people. I never thought about those things before. Foot-
ball and trying to be white to my fellow-man were about
the extent of my college curriculum.

** But since I came back and found out how dad made
his money I've been thinking. I'd like awfully well to
pay back those chaps who had to give up too much money
for bread. I know it would buck the line of my income
for a good many yards; but I'd like to make it square
with 'em. Is there any way it can be done, old Ways and
Means?"

Kenwitz's big black eyes glowed fierily. His thin,
intellectual face took on almost a sardonic cast. H&
caught Dan's arm with the grip of a friend and a judge.

" You can't do it ! " he said, emphatically. " One of the
chief punishments of you men of ill-gotten wealth is that
when you do repent you find that you have lost the power
to make reparation or restitution. I admire your good
intentions, Dan, but you can't do anything. Those people
were robbed of their precious pennies. It's too late to
remedy the evil. You can't pay them back."

112 Strictly Business

" Of course," said Dan, lighting his pipe, *' we couldn't
hunt up every one of the duffers and hand 'em back the
right change. There's an awful lot of 'em buying bread
all the time. Funny taste they have — I never cared
for bread especially, except for a toasted cracker with the
Roquefort. But we might find a few of 'em and chuck
some of dad's cash back where it came from. I'd feel
better if I could. It seems tough for people to be held
up for a soggy thing like bread. One wouldn't mind
standing a rise in broiled lobsters or devilled crabs.
Get to work and think, Ken. I want to pay back all of
that money I can."

"There are plenty of charities," said Kenwitz, mechan-
ically.

"Easy enough," said Dan, in a cloud of smoke. "I
suppose I could give the city a park, or endow an aspara-
gus bed in a hospital. But I don't want Paul to get away
with the proceeds of the gold brick we sold Peter. It's
the bread shorts I want to cover, Ken."

The thin fingers of Kenwitz moved rapidly.

" Do you know how much money it would take to pay
back the losses of consumers during that corner in flour ?"
he asked.

"I do not," said Dan, stoutly. "My lawyer tells me
that I have two millions."

"If you had a hundred millions," said Kenwitz, vehe-
mently, "you couldn't repair a thousandth part of the

The Unknown Quantity 113

damage that has been done. You cannot conceive of
the accumulated evils produced by misapplied wealth.
Each penny that was wrung from the lean purses of the
poor reacted a thousandfold to their harm. You do not
understand. You do not see how hopeless is your
desire to make restitution. Not in a single instance
can it be done.

"Back up, philosopher!" said Dan. *'The penny has
no sorrow that the dollar cannot heal."

"Not in one instance," repeated Kenwitz. "I will
give you one, and let us see. Thomas Boyne had a little
bakery over there in Varick Street. He sold bread to the
poorest people. When the price of flour went up he had
to raise the price of bread. His customers were too poor
to pay it, Boyne's business failed and he lost his $1,000
capital — all he had in the world."

Dan Kinsolving struck the park bench a mighty blow
with his fist.

"I accept the instance," he cried. "Take me to
Boyne. I will repay his thousand dollars and buy him
a new bakery."

*' Write your check," said Kenwitz, without moving,
"and then begin to write checks in payment of the train
of consequences. Draw the next one for $50,000. Boyne
went insane after his failure and set fire to the building
from which he was about to be evicted. The loss
amounted to that much. Boyne died in an asylum."

114 Strictly Business

"Stick to the instance," said Dan. *'I haven't noticed
any insurance companies on my charity list."

"Draw your next check for $100,000," went on Ken-
witz. "Boyne's son fell into bad ways after the bakery
closed, and was accused of murder. He was acquitted
last week after a three years' legal battle, and the state
draws upon taxpayers for that much expense."

"Back to the bakery!" exclaimed Dan, impatiently.
" The Government doesn't need to stand in the bread line."

" The last item of the instance is — come and I will
show you," said Kenwitz, rising.

The Socialistic watchmaker was happy. He was a
millionaire-baiter by nature and a pessimist by trade.
Kenwitz would assure you in one breath that money was
but evil and corruption, and that your brand-new watch
needed cleaning and a new ratchet-wheel.

He conducted Kinsolving southward out of the square
and into ragged, poverty-haunted Varick Street. Up the
narrow stairway of a squalid brick tenement he led the
penitent offspring of the Octopus. He knocked on a
door, and a clear voice called to them to enter.

In that almost bare room a young woman sat sewing
at a machine. She nodded to Kenwitz as to a familiar
acquaintance. One little stream of sunlight through the
dingy window burnished her heavy hair to the color of an
ancient Tuscan's shield. She flashed a rippling smile at
Kenwitz and a look of somewhat flustered inquiry.

The Unknown Quantity 115

Kinsolving stood regarding her clear and pathetic
beauty in heart-throbbing silence. Thus they came into
the presence of the last item of the Instance.

**How many this week, Miss Mary?" asked the
watchmaker. A mountain of coarse gray shirts lay
upon the floor.

"Nearly thirty dozen," said the young woman cheer-
fully. '*I've made almost $4. I'm improving, Mr.
Kenwitz. I hardly know what to do with so much
money." Her eyes turned, brightly soft, in the direction
of Dan. A little pink spot came out on her round, pale
cheek.

Kenwitz chuckled like a diabolic raven.

** Miss Boyne," he said, " let me present Mr. Kinsolving,
the son of the man who put bread up five years ago. He
thinks he would like to do something to aid those who were
inconvenienced by that act."

The smile left the young woman's face. She rose and
pointed her forefinger toward the door. This time she
looked Kinsolving straight in the eye, but it was not a
look that gave delight.

The two men went down into Varick Street. Kenwitz,
letting all his pessimism and rancor and hatred of the
Octopus come to the surface, gibed at the moneyed side
of his friend in an acrid torrent of words. Dan appeared
to be listening, and then turned to Kenwitz and shook
hands with him warmly.

116 Strictly Business

** I'm obliged to you, Ken, old man," he said vaguely —
"a thousand times obliged."

"Mein Gott! you are crazy!" cried the watchmaker,
dropping his spectacles for the first time in years.

Two months afterward Kenwitz went into a large
bakery on lower Broadway with a pair of gold-rimmed
eyeglasses that he had mended for the proprietor.

A lady was giving an order to a clerk as Kenwitz
passed her.

"These loaves are ten cents," said the clerk.

" I always get them at eight cents uptown," said the lady.
*' You need not fill the order. I will drive by there on my
way home."

The voice was familiar. The watchmaker paused.

"Mr. Kenwitz!" cried the lady, heartily. "How do
you do?"

Kenwitz was trying to train his socialistic and economic
comprehension on her wonderful fur boa and the carriage
waiting outside.

" Why, Miss Boyne ! " he began.

"Mrs. Kinsolving," she corrected. "Dan and I were
married ia month ago."

XI

THE THING'S THE PLAY

Being acquainted with a newspaper reporter who had
a couple of free passes, I got to see the performance a
few nights ago at one of the popular vaudeville houses.

One of the numbers was a violin solo by a striking-
looking man not much past forty, but with very gray
thick hair. Not being afflicted with a taste for music, I
let the system of noises drift past my ears while I regarded
the man.

"There was a story about that chap a month or two
ago," said the reporter. "They gave me the assignment.
It was to run a column and was to be on the extremely
light and joking order. The old man seems to like the
funny touch I give to local happenings. Oh, yes, I'm
working on a farce comedy now. Well, I went down to
the house and got all the details; but I certainly fell down
on that job. I went back and turned in a comic write-up
of an east side funeral instead. Why ? Oh, I couldn't
seem to get hold of it with my funny hooks, somehow.
Maybe you could make a one-act tragedy out of it for a
curtain-raiser. 1*11 give you the details."

117

118 Strictly Business

After the performance my friend, the reporter, recited
to me the facts over the Wiirzburger.

"I see no reason,'* said I, when he had concluded,
**why that shouldn't make a rattling good funny story.
Those three people couldn't have acted in a more absurd
and preposterous manner if they had been real actors in
a real theatre. I'm really afraid that all the stage is a
world, anyhow, and all the players merely men and
women. *The thing's the play,' is the way I quote Mr.
Shakespeare."

"Try it," said the reporter.

"I will," said I; and I did, to show him how he could
have made a humorous column of it for his paper.

There stands a house near Abingdon Square. On the
ground floor there has been for twenty-five years a little
store where toys and notions and stationery are sold.

One night twenty years ago there was a wedding in the
rooms above the store. The Widow Mayo owned the
house and store. Her daughter Helen was married to
Frank Barry. John Delaney was best man. Helen
was eighteen, and her picture had been printed in a morn-
ing paper next to the headlines of a "Wholesale Female
Murderess " story from Butte, Mont. But after your eye
and intelligence had rejected the connection, you seized
your magnifying glass and read beneath the portrait her
description as one of a series of Prominent Beauties and
Belles of the lower west side.

The Things the Play 119

Frank Barry and John Delaney were "prominent"
young beaux of the same side, and bosom friends, whom
you expected to turn upon each other every time the cur-
tain went up. One who pays his money for orchestra
seats and fiction expects this. That is the first funny idea
that has turned up in the story yet. Both had made a
great race for Helen's hand. When Frank won, John
shook his hand and congratulated him — honestly, he did.

After the ceremony Helen ran upstairs to put on her
hat. She was getting married in a traveling dress. She
and Frank were going to Old Point Comfort for a week.
Downstairs the usual horde of gibbering cave-dwellers
were waiting with their hands full of old Congress gaiters
and paper bags of hominy.

Then there was a rattle of the fire-escape, and into her
room jumps the mad and infatuated John Delaney, with
a damp curl drooping upon his forehead, and made
violent and reprehensible love to his lost one, entreating
her to flee or fly with him to the Riviera, or the Bronx,
or any old place where there are Italian skies and dolce
far niente.

It would have carried Blaney off his feet to see Helen
repulse him. With blazing and scornful eyes she fairly
withered him by demanding whatever he meant by
speaking to respectable people that way.

In a few moments she had him going. The manliness
that had possessed him departed. He bowed low, and

120 Strictly Business

said something about " irresistible impulse " and " forever
carry in his heart the memory of " — and she suggested
that he catch the first fire-escape going down.

"I will away," said John Delaney, "to the furthermost
parts of the earth. I cannot remain near you and know
that you are another's. I will to Africa, and there amid
other scenes strive to for "

" For goodness sake, get out," said Helen. " Somebody
might come in."

He knelt upon one knee, and she extended him one
white hand that he might give it a farewell kiss.

Girls, was this choice boon of the great little god Cupid
ever vouchsafed you — to have the fellow you want hard
and fast, and have the one you don't want come with a
damp curl on his forehead and kneel to you and babble
of Africa and love which, in spite of everything, shall
forever bloom, an amaranth, in his heart? To know
your power, and to feel the sweet security of your own
happy state; to send the unlucky one, broken-hearted,
to foreign climes, while you congratulate yourself as he
presses his last kiss upon your knuckles, that your nails
are well manicured — say, girls, it's galluptious — don't
ever let it get by you.

And then, of course — how did you guess it ? — the
door opened and in stalked the bridegroom, jealous of
slow-tying bonnet strings.

The farewell kiss was imprinted upon Helen's hand.

The Thing's the Play 121

and out of the window and down the fire-escape sprang
John Delaney, Africa bound.

A httle slow music, if you please — faint violin, just a
breath in the clarinet and a touch of the 'cello. Imagine
the scene. Frank, white-hot, with the cry of a man
wounded to death bursting from him. Helen, rushing
and clinging to him, trying to explain. He catches her
wrists and tears them from his shoulders — once, twice,
thrice he sways her this way and that — the stage manager
will show you how — and throws her from him to the
floor a huddled, crushed, moaning thing. Never, he
cries, will he look upon her face again, and rushes from
the house through the staring groups of astonished guests.

And, now, because it is the Thing instead of the Play,
the audience must stroll out into the real lobby of the world
and marry, die, grow gray, rich, poor, happy or sad dur-
ing the intermission of twenty years which must precede
the rising of the curtain again.

Mrs. Barry inherited the shop and the house. At
thirty-eight she could have bested many an eighteen-year-
old at a beauty show on points and general results. Only
a few people remembered her wedding comedy, but she
made of it no secret. She did not pack it in lavender or
moth balls, nor did she sell it to a magazine.

One day a middle-aged, money-making lawyer, who
bought his legal cap and ink of her, asked her across the
counter to marry him.

122 Strictly Business

"I'm really much obliged to you," said Helen, cheer-
fully, " but I married another man twenty years ago. He
was more a goose than a man, but I think I love him yet.
I have never seen him since about half an hour after the
ceremony. Was it copying ink that you wanted or just
wTiting fluid ? "

The lawyer bowed over the counter with old-time grace
and left a respectful kiss on the back of her hand. Helen
sighed. Parting salutes, however romantic, may be
overdone. Here she was at thirty-eight, beautiful and
admired; and all that she seemed to have got from her
lovers were reproaches and adieus. Worse still, in the
last one she had lost a customer, too.

Business languished, and she hung out a Room to Let
card. Two large rooms on the third floor were prepared
for desirable tenants. Roomers came, and went regret-
fully, for the house of Mrs. Barry was the abode of neat-
ness, comfort and taste.

One day came Ramonti, the violinist, and engaged the
front room above. The discord and clatter uptown
offended his nice ear; so a friend had sent him to this
oasis in the desert of noise.

Ramonti, with his still youthful face, his dark eyebrows,
his short, pointed, foreign, brown beard, his distinguished
head of gray hair, and his artist's temperament — revealed
in his light, gay and sympathetic manner — was a wel-
come tenant in the old house near Abingdon Square.

The Thing s the Play 123

Helen lived on the floor above the store. The archi-
tecture of it was singular and quaint. The hall was
large and almost square. Up one side of it, and then
across the end of it ascended an open stairway to the
floor above. This hall space she had furnished as a
sitting room and office combined. There she kept her
desk and wrote her business letters; and there she sat
of evenings by a warm fire and a bright red light and sewed
or read. Ramonti found the atmosphere so agreeable
that he spent much time there, describing to Mrs. Barry
the wonders of Paris, where he had studied with a par-
ticularly notorious and noisy fiddler.

Next comes lodger No. 2, a handsome, melancholy
man in the early 40's, with a brown, mysterious beard,
and strangely pleading, haunting eyes. He, too, found
the society of Helen a desirable thing. With the eyes
of Romeo and Othello's tongue, he charmed her with
tales of distant climes and wooed her by respectful
innuendo.

From the first Helen felt a marvelous and compelling
thrill in the presence of this man. His voice somehow
took her swiftly back to the days of her youth's romance.
This feeling grew, and she gave way to it, and it led her
to an instinctive belief that he had been a factor in that
romance. And then with a woman's reasoning (oh, yes,
they do, sometimes) she leaped over common syllogisms
and theory, and logic, and was sure that her husband had

124 Strictly Business

come back to her. For she saw in his eyes love, which
no woman can mistake, and a thousand tons of regret
and remorse, which aroused pity, which is perilously near
to love requited, which is the sine qua non in the house that
Jack built.

But she made no sign. A husband who steps around
the corner for twenty years and then drops in again should
not expect to find his slippers laid out too conveniently
near nor a match ready lighted for his cigar. There
must be expiation, explanation, and possibly execration.
A little purgatory, and then, maybe, if he were
properly humble, he might be trusted with a harp
and crown. And so she made no sign that she knew
or suspected.

And my friend, the reporter, could see nothing funny
in this ! Sent out on an assignment to write up a roaring,
hilarious, brilliant joshing story of — but I will not knock
a brother — let us go on with the story.

One evening Ramonti stopped in Helen's hall-office-
reception-room and told his love with the tenderness and
ardor of the enraptured artist. His words were a bright
flame of the divine fire that glows in the heart of a man
who is a dreamer and a doer combined.

** But before you give me an answer," he went on, before
she could accuse him of suddenness, " I must tell you that
* Ramonti* is the only name I have to offer you. My
manager gave me that. I do not know who I am or where

The Things the Play 125

I came from. My first recollection is of opening my eyes
in a hospital. I was a young man, and I had been there
for weeks. My life before that is a blank to me. They
told me that I was found lying in the street with a wound
on my head and was brought there in an ambulance.
They thought I must have fallen and struck my head
upon the stones. There was nothing to show who I was.
I have never been able to remember. After I was dis-
charged from the hospital, I took up the violin. I have
had success. Mrs. Barry — I do not know your name
except that — I love you ; the first time I saw you I
realized that you were the one woman in the world for
me — and " — oh, a lot of stuff like that.

Helen felt young again. First a wave of pride and a
sweet little thrill of vanity went all over her; and then
she looked Ramonti in the eyes, and a tremendous
throb went through her heart. She hadn't expected
that throb. It took her by surprise. The musician
had become a big factor in her life, and she hadn't
been aware of it.

"Mr. Ramonti," she said sorrowfully (this was not
on the stage, remember; it was in the old home near
Abingdon Square), "I'm awfully sorry, but I'm a married
woman."

And then she told him the sad story of her life, as a
heroine must do, sooner or later, either to a theatrical
manager or to a reporter.

126 Strictly Business

Ramonti took her hand, bowed low and kissed it, and
went up to his room.

Helen sat down and looked mournfully at her hand.
Well she might. Three suitors had kissed it, mounted
their red roan steeds and ridden away.

In an hour entered the mysterious stranger with the
haunting eyes. Helen was in the willow rocker, knitting
a useless thing in cotton-wool. He ricocheted from the
stairs and stopped for a chat. Sitting across the table
from her, he also poured out his narrative of love. And
then he said: "Helen, do you not remember me.-^ I
think I have seen it in your eyes. Can you forgive the
past and remember the love that has lasted for twenty
years ? I wronged you deeply — I was afraid to come
back to you — but my love overpowered ray reason. Can
you, will you, forgive me.'^"

Helen stood up. The mysterious stranger held one of
her hands in a strong and trembling clasp.

There she stood, and I pity the stage that it
has not acquired a scene like that and her emotions
to portray.

For she stood with a divided heart. The fresh, unfor-
gettable, virginal love for her bridegroom was hers; the
treasured, sacred, honored memory of her first choice
filled half her soul. She leaned to that pure feeling.
Honor and faith and sweet, abiding romance bound her
to it. But the other half of her heart and soul was filled

The Things the Play 127

with something else — a later, fuller, nearer influence.
And so the old fought against the new.

And while she hesitated, from the room above came the
soft, racking, petitionary music of a violin. The hag,
music, bewitches some of the noblest. The daws may
peck upon one's sleeve without injury, but whoever wears
his heart upon his tympanum gets it not far from the neck.

This music and the musician called her, and at her side
honor and the old love held her back.

"Forgive me," he pleaded.

"Twenty years is a long time to remain away from
the one you say you love," she declared, with a
purgatorial touch.

"How could I tell.^" he begged. "I will conceal
nothing from you. That night when he left I followed
him. I was mad with jealousy. On a dark street I
struck him down. He did not rise. I examined him.
His head had struck a stone. I did not intend to kill him.
I was mad with love and jealousy. I hid near by and
saw an ambulance take him away. Although you
married him, Helen "

" Who Are You? " cried the woman, with wide-
open eyes, snatching her hand away.

"Don't you remember me, Helen — the one who has
always loved you the best ? I am John Delaney. If you
can forgive "

But she was gone, leaping, stumbling, hurrying, flying

128 Strictly Business

up the stairs toward the music and him who had forgotten,
but who had known her for his in each of his two existences,
and as she climbed up she sobbed, cried and sang:
"Frank! Frank! Frank!"

Three mortals thus juggling with years as though they
were billiard balls, and my friend, the reporter, couldn't
see anything funny in it!

xn

A RAMBLE IN APHASIA

My wife and I parted on that morning in precisely our
usual manner. She left her second cup of tea to follow
me to the front door. There she plucked from my lapel
the invisible strand of lint (the universal act of woman
to proclaim ownership) and bade me take care of my cold.
I had no cold. Next came her kiss of parting — the
level kiss of domesticity flavored with Young Hyson.
There was no fear of the extemporaneous, of variety
spicing her infinite custom. With the deft touch of long
malpractice, she dabbed awry my well-set scarf pin; and
then, as I closed the door, I heard her morning slippers
pattering back to her cooling tea.

WTien I set out I had no thought or premonition of what
was to occur. The attack came suddenly.

For many weeks I had been toiling, almost night and
day, at a famous railroad law case that I won triumphantly
but a few days previously. In fact, I had been digging
away at the law almost without cessation for many years.
Once or twice good Doctor Volney, my friend and physi-
cian, had warned me.

129

130 Strictly Business

"If you don't slacken up, Bellford," he said, "you'll
go suddenly to pieces. Either your nerves or your brain
will give way. Tell me, does a week pass in which you
do not read in the papers of a case of aphasia — of some
man lost, wandering nameless, with his past and his
identity blotted out — and all from that little brain clot
made by overwork or worry?"

"I always thought," said I, "that the clot in those
instances was really to be found on the brains of the news-
paper reporters."

Doctor Volney shook his head.

"The disease exists," he said. "You need a change
or a rest. Court-room, office and home — there is the
only route you travel. For recreation you — read law
books. Better take warning in time."

"On Thursday nights," I said, defensively, "my wife
and I play cribbage. On Sundays she reads to me the
weekly letter from her mother. That law books are not
a recreation remains yet to be established."

That morning as I walked I was thinking of Doctor
Volney's words. I was feeling as well as I usually did
— possibly in better spirits than usual.

I awoke with stiff and cramped muscles from having
slept long on the incommodious seat of a day coach. I
leaned my head against the seat and tried to think. After
a long time I said to myself: "I must have a name of

A Ramble in Aphasia 131

some sort." I searched my pockets. Not a card; not
a letter; not a paper or monogram could 1 find. But I
found in my coat pocket nearly $3,000 in bills of large
denomination. "1 must be some one, of course," I
repeated to myself, and began again to consider.

The car was well crowded with men, among whom, 1
told myself, there must have been some common interest,
for they intermingled freely, and seemed in the best good
humor and spirits. One of them — a stout, spectacled
gentleman enveloped in a decided odor of cinnamon
and aloes — took the vacant half of my seat with a
friendly nod, and unfolded a newspaper. In the
intervals between his periods of reading, we conversed,
as travelers will, on current affairs. 1 found myself
able to sustain the conversation on such subjects with
credit, at least to my memory. By and by my com-
panion said:

"You are one of us, of course. Fine lot of men the
West sends in this time. I'm glad they held the con-
vention in New York; I've never been East before. My
name's R. P. Bolder — Bolder & Son, of Hickory Grove,
Missouri."

Though unprepared, I rose to the emergency, as men
will when put to it. Now must 1 hold a christening, and
be at once babe, parson and parent. My senses came
to the rescue of my slower brain. The insistent odor of
drugs from my companion supplied one idea; a glance

13^ Strictly Business

at his newspaper, where my eye met a conspicuous adver-
tisement, assisted me further.

"My name," said I, glibly, "is Edward Pinkhammer.
I am a druggist, and my home is in Cornopolis, Kansas.**

"I knew you were a druggist,'* said my fellow traveler,
affably. "I saw the callous spot on your right forefinger
where the handle of the pestle rubs. Of course, you are
a delegate to our National Convention.**

"Are all these men druggists ?** I asked, wonderingly.

"They are. This car came through from the West.
And they're your old-time druggists, too — none of your
patent tablet-and-granule pharmashootists that use slot
machines instead of a prescription desk. We percolate
our own paregoric and roll our own pills, and we ain't
above handling a few garden seeds in the spring, and
carrying a side line of confectionery and shoes. I tell you
Hampinker, I've got an idea to spring on this convention
— new ideas is what they want. Now, you know the
shelf bottles of tartar emetic and Rochelle salt Ant. et
Pot. Tart, and Sod. et Pot. Tart. — one's poison, you
know, and the other's harmless. It's easy to mistake one
label for the other. Where do druggists mostly keep 'em ?
Why, as far apart as possible, on different shelves. That's
wrong. I say keep 'em side by side, so when you want
one you can always compare it with the other and avoid
mistakes. Do you catch the idea?"

"It seems to me a very good one,** I said.

A Ramble in Aphasia 133

"All right! \Mien I spring it on the convention you
back it up. We'll make some of these Eastern orange-
phosphate-and-massage-cream professors that think
they're the only lozenges in the market look like hypo-
dermic tablets."

"If I can be of any aid," I said, warming, *'the two
bottles of — er "

"Tartrate of antimony and potash, and tartrate of
soda and potash."

"Shall henceforth sit side by side," I concluded, firmly.

"Now, there's another thing," said Mr. Bolder. "For
an excipient in manipulating a pill mass which do you
prefer — the magnesia carbonate or the pulverized glycer-
rhiza radix?"

"The — er — magnesia," I said. It was easier to say
than the other word.

Mr. Bolder glanced at me distrustfully through his
spectacles.

" Give me the glycerrhiza," said he. " Magnesia cakes.'*

"Here's another one of these fake aphasia cases," he
said, presently, handing me his newspaper, and laying his
finger upon an article. "I don't believe in 'em. I put
nine out of ten of 'em down as frauds. A man gets sick
of his business and his folks and wants to have a good
time. He skips out somewhere, and when they find him
he pretends to have lost his memory — don't know his
own name, and won't even recognize the strawberry mark

134 Strictly Business

on his wife's left shoulder. Aphasia! Tut! AMiy can't
they stay at home and forget?"

I took the paper and read, after the pungent head-lines,
the following:

"Denver, June 12. — Elwyn C. Bellford, a prominent lawyer,
is mysteriously missing from his home since three days ago, and
all efforts to locate him have been in vain. Mr. Bellford is a
well-known citizen of the highest standing, and has enjoyed a
large and lucrative law practice. He is married and owns a fine
home and the most extensive private library in the State. On the
day of his disappearance, he drew quite a large sum of money
from his bank. No one can be found who saw him after he left
the bank. Mr. Bellford was a man of singularly quiet and
domestic tastes, and seemed to find his happiness in his home
and profession. If any clue at all exists to his strange disap-
pearance, it may be found in the fact that for some months he
has been deeply absorbed in an important law case in connection
with the Q. Y. and Z. Railroad Company. It is feared that
overwork may have affected his mind. Every effort is being
made to discover the whereabouts of the missing man."

"It seems to me you are not altogether uncynical, Mr.
Bolder," I said, after I had read the despatch. "This
has the sound, to me, of a genuine case. Why should this
man, prosperous, happily married and respected, choose
suddenly to abandon everything ? I know that these
lapses of memory do occur, and that men do find them-
selves adrift without a name, a history or a home."

"Oh, gammon and jalap!" said Mr. Bolder. "It's

A Ramble in Aphasia 135

larks they're after. There's too much education nowa-
days. Men know about aphasia, and they use it for an
excuse. The women are w^ise, too. When it's all over
they look you in the eye, as scientific as you please, and
say: 'He hypnotized me.' "

Thus Mr. Bolder diverted, but did not aid, me with
his comments and philosophy.

We arrived in New York about ten at night. I rode in
a cab to a hotel, and I wrote my name "Edward Pink-
hammer" in the register. As I did so I felt pervade me
a splendid, wild, intoxicating buoyancy — a sense of
unlimited freedom, of newly attained possibilities. I was
just born into the world. The old fetters — whatever
they had been — were stricken from my hands and feet.
The future lay before me a clear road such as an infant
enters, and I could set out upon it equipped with a man's
learning and experience.

I thought the hotel clerk looked at me five seconds too
long. I had no baggage.

"The Druggists' Convention," I said. "My trunk
has somehow failed to arrive." I drew out a roll of
money.

"Ah!" said he, showing an auriferous tooth, "we have
quite a number of the Western delegates stopping here."
He struck a bell for the boy.

I endeavored to give color to my role.

"There is an important movement on foot among us

136 Strictly Business

Westerners," I said, "in regard to a recommendation to
the convention that the bottles containing the tartrate of
antimony and potash, and the tartrate of sodium and
potash be kept in a contiguous position on the shelf."

"Gentleman to three-fourteen," said the clerk, hastily.
I was whisked away to my room.

The next day I bought a trunk and clothing, and began
to live the life of Edward Pinkhammer. I did not tax
my brain with endeavors to solve problems of the past.

It was a piquant and sparkling cup that the great island
city held up to my lips. I drank of it gratefully. The
keys of Manhattan belong to him who is able to bear them.
You must be either the city's guest or its victim.

The following few days were as gold and silver.
Edward Pinkhammer, yet counting back to his birth by
hours only, knew the rare joy of having come upon so
diverting a world full-fledged and unrestrained. I sat
entranced on the magic carpets provided in theatres and
roof-gardens, that transported one into strange and
delightful lands full of frolicsome music, pretty girls
and grotesque, drolly extravagant parodies upon human
kind. I went here and there at my own dear will, bound
by no limits of space, time or comportment. I dined in
weird cabarets, at weirder tables d'hote to the sound of
Hungarian music and the wild shouts of mercurial artists
and sculptors. Or, again, where the night life quivers in
the electric glare like a kinetoscopic picture, and the mil-

A Ramble in Aphasia 137

linery of the world, and its jewels, and the ones whom
they adorn, and the men who make all three possible are
met for good cheer and the spectacular effect. And
among all these scenes that I have mentioned I learned
one thing that I never knew before. And that is that the
key to liberty is not in the hands of License, but Con-
vention holds it. Comity has a toll-gate at which you
must pay, or you may not enter the land of Freedom. In
all the glitter, the seeming disorder, the parade, the
abandon, I saw this law, unobtrusive, yet like iron, prevail.
Therefore, in Manhattan you must obey these unwritten
laws, and then you will be freest of the free. If you
decline to be bound by them, you put on shackles.

Sometimes, as my mood urged me, I would seek the
stately, softly murmuring palm rooms, redolent with high-
born life and delicate restraint, in which to dine. Again
I would go down to the waterways in steamers packed
with vociferous, bedecked, unchecked love-making clerks
and shop-girls to their crude pleasures on the island
shores. And there was always Broadway — glistening,
opulent, wily, varying, desirable Broadway — growing
upon one like an opium habit.

One afternoon as I entered my hotel a stout man with
a big nose and a black mustache blocked my way in the
corridor. When I would have passed around him, he
greeted me with offensive familiarity.

"Hallo, Bellford!" he cried, loudly. "What the deuce

138 Strictly Business

are you doing in New York? Didn't know anything
could drag you away from that old book den of
yours. Is Mrs. B. along or is this a little business
run alone, eh?"

"You have made a mistake, sir," I said, coldly, releas-
ing my hand from his grasp. "My name is Pinkhammer.
You will excuse me."

The man dropped to one side, apparently astonished.
As I walked to the clerk's desk I heard him call to a bell
boy and say something about telegraph blanks.

"You will give me my bill," I said to the clerk, "and
have my baggage brought down in half an hour. I do
not care to remain where I am annoyed by confidence
men.'*

I moved that afternoon to another hotel, a sedate, old-
fashioned one on lower Fifth Avenue.

There was a restaurant a little way off Broadway where
one could be served almost al fresco in a tropic array of
screening flora. Quiet and luxuiy and a perfect service
made it an ideal place in which to take luncheon or refresh-
ment. One afternoon I was there picking my way to a
table among the ferns when I felt my sleeve caught.

"Mr. Bellford!" exclaimed an amazingly sweet voice.

I turned quickly to see a lady seated alone — a lady
of about thirty, with exceedingly handsome eyes, who
looked at me as though I had been her very dear friend.

"You were about to pass me," she said, accusingly.

A Ramble in Aphasia 139

"Don't tell me you did not know me. Why should we
not shake hands — at least once in fifteen years ?"

I shook hands with her at once. I took a chair opposite
her at the table. I summoned with my eyebrows a hover-
ing waiter. The lady was philandering with an orange
ice. I ordered a crhne de menthe. Her hair was reddish
bronze. You could not look at it, because you could not
look away from her eyes. But you were conscious of it
as you are conscious of sunset while you look into the
profundities of a wood at twilight.

'*Are you sure you know me.^" I asked.

"No," she said, smiling, "I was never sure of that."

"What would you think," I said, a little anxiously, "if
I were to tell you that my name is Edward Pinkhammer,
from Cornopolis, Kansas.^"

"WTiat would I think?" she repeated, with a merry
glance. "Why, that you had not brought Mrs. Bellford
to New York with you, of course. I do wish you had. I
would have liked to see Marian." Her voice lowered
slightly — "You haven't changed much, Elwyn."

I felt her wonderful eyes searching mine and my face
more closely.

"Yes, you have," she amended, and there was a soft,
exultant note in her latest tones; "I see it now. You
haven't forgotten. You haven't forgotten for a year or a
day or an hour. I told you you never could."

I poked my straw anxiously in the creme de menthe.

140 Strictly Business

"I'm sure I beg your pardon," I said, a little uneasy
at her gaze. **But that is just the trouble. I have
forgotten. I've forgotten everything."

She flouted my denial. She laughed deliciously at
something she seemed to see in my face.

"I've heard of you at times," she went on. "You're
quite a big lawyer out West — Denver, isn't it, or Los
Angeles? Marian must be very proud of you. You
knew, I suppose, that I married six months after you did.
You may have seen it in the papers. The flowers alone
cost two thousand dollars."

She had mentioned fifteen years. Fifteen years is a
long time.

"Would it be too late," I asked, somewhat timorously,
"to offer you congratulations?"

"Not if you dare do it," she answered, with such fine
intrepidity that I was silent, and began to crease patterns
on the cloth with my thumb nail.

"Tell me one thing," she said, leaning toward me rather
eagerly — "a thing I have wanted to know for many
years — just from a woman's curiosity, of course — have
you ever dared since that night to touch, smell or
look at white roses — at white roses wet with rain
and dew?"

I took a sip of creme de menthe.

"It would be useless, I suppose," I said, with a sigh,
"for me to repeat that I have no recollection at all about

A Ramble in Aphasia 141

these things. My memory is completely at fault. 1 need
not say how much I regret it."

The lady rested her arms upon the table, and again her
eyes disdained my words and went traveling by their own
route direct to my soul. She laughed softly, with a
strange quality in the sound — it was a laugh of happi-
ness — yes, and of content — and of misery. I tried to
look away from her.

"You lie, Elwyn Bellford," she breathed, blissfully.
"Oh, I know you lie!"

I gazed dully into the ferns.

"My name is Edward Pinkhammer," I said. "I
came with the delegates to the Druggists' National Con-
vention. There is a movement on foot for arranging a
new position for the bottles of tartrate of antimony and
tartrate of potash, in which, very likely, you would take
little interest."

A shining landau stopped before the entrance. The
lady rose. I took her hand, and bowed.

"I am deeply sorry," I said to her, "that I cannot
remember. I could explain, but fear you would not
understand. You will not concede Pinkhammer; and
I really cannot at all conceive of the — the roses and
other things."

"Good-by, Mr. Bellford," she said, with her happy,
sorrowful smile, as she stepped into her carriage.

I attended the theatre that night. When I returned

142 Strictly Business

to my hotel, a quiet man in dark clothes, who seemed
interested in rubbing his finger nails with a silk handker-
chief, appeared, magically, at my side.

*'Mr. Pinkhammer," he said, casually, giving the bulk
of his attention to his forefinger, "may I request you to
step aside with me for a little conversation ? There is a
room here."

"Certainly," I answered.

He conducted me into a small, private parlor. A
lady and a gentleman were there. The lady, I surmised,
would have been unusually good-looking had her features
not been clouded by an expression of keen worry and
fatigue. She was of a style of figure and possessed color-
ing and features that were agreeable to my fancy. She
was in a traveling dress; she fixed upon me an earnest
look of extreme anxiety, and pressed an unsteady hand
to her bosom. I think she would have started forward,
but the gentleman arrested her movement with an authori-
tative motion of his hand. He then came, himself, to
meet me. He was a man of forty, a little gray about the
temples, and with a strong, thoughtful face.

"Bellford, old man," he said, cordially, "I'm glad to
see you again. Of course we know everything is all right.
I warned you, you know, that you were overdoing it.
Now, you'll go back with us, and be yourself again in no
time."

I smiled ironically.

A Ramble in Aphasia 143

"I have been ' Bellforded' so often," I said, "that it
has lost its edge. Still, in the end, it may grow wearisome.
Would you be willing at all to entertain the hypothesis
that my name is Edward Pinkhammer, and that I never
saw you before in my life?"

Before the man could reply a wailing cry came from the
woman. She sprang past his detaining arm. "Elwyn!"
she sobbed, and cast herself upon me, and clung tight.
"Elwyn," she cried again, "don't break my heart. I am
your wife — call my name once — just once ! I could
see you dead rather than this way."

I unwound her arms respectfully, but firmly.

"Madam," I said, severely, "pardon me if I suggest
that you accept a resemblance too precipitately. It is
a pity," I went on, with an amused laugh, as the thought
occurred to me, "that this Bellford and I could not be
kept side by side upon the same shelf like tartrates of
sodium and antimony for purposes of identification. In
order to understand the allusion," I concluded airily,
"it may be necessary for you to keep an eye on the pro-
ceedings of the Druggists' National Convention."

The lady turned to her companion, and grasped his arm.

"What is it. Doctor Volney? Oh, what is it.?" she
moaned.

He led her to the door.

" Go to your room for a while," I heard him say. "I
will remain and talk mih him. His mind ? No, I think

144 Strictly Business

not — only a portion of the brain. Yes, I am sure he will
recover. Go to your room and leave me with him."

The lady disappeared. The man in dark clothes also
went outside, still manicuring himself in a thoughtful
way. I think he waited in the hall.

"I would like to talk with you a while, Mr. Pink-
hammer, if I may," said the gentleman who remained.

"Very well, if you care to," I replied, "and will excuse
me if I take it comfortably; I am rather tired." I
stretched myself upon a couch by a window and lit a
cigar. He drew a chair nearby.

"Let us speak to the point," he said, soothingly.
**Your name is not Pinkhammer."

"I know that as well as you do," I said, coolly. "But
a man must have a name of some sort. I can assure you
that I do not extravagantly admire the name of Pink-
hammer. But when one christens one's self suddenly,
the fine names do not seem to suggest themselves. But,
suppose it had been Scheringhausen or Scroggins! I
think I did very well with Pinkhammer."

" Your name," said the other man, seriously, " is Elwyn
C. Bellford. You are one of the first lawyers in Denver.
You are suffering from an attack of aphasia, which has
caused you to forget your identity. The cause of it was
over-application to your profession, and, perhaps, a life
too bare of natural recreation and pleasures. The lady
who has just left the room is your wife."

A Ramble in Aphasia 145

" She is what I would call a fine-looking woman," I said,
after a judicial pause. "I particularly admire the shade
of brown in her hair."

"She is a wife to be proud of. Since your disappear-
ance, nearly two weeks ago, she has scarcely closed her
eyes. We learned that you were in New York through
a telegram sent by Isidore Newman, a traveling man from
Denver. He said that he had met you in a hotel here, and
that you did not recognize him."

"I think I remember the occasion," I said. "The
fellow called me 'Bellford,' if I am not mistaken. But
don't you think it about time, now, for you to introduce
yourself ? "

" I am Robert Volney — Doctor Volney. I have been
your close friend for twenty years, and your physician for
fifteen. I came with Mrs. Bellford to trace you as soon
as we got the telegram. Try, Elwyn, old man — try to
remember!"

"What's the use to try.^" I asked, with a little frown.
"You say you are a physician. Is aphasia curable.^
When a man loses his memory does it return slowly, or
suddenly ? "

"Sometimes gradually and imperfectly; sometimes as
suddenly as it went."

" Will you undertake the treatment of my case. Doctor
Volney ? " I asked.

"Old friend," said he, "I'll do everything in my

146 Strictly Business

power, and will have done everything that science can
do to cure you."

" Very well," said I. " Then you will consider that I am
your patient. Everything is in confidence now — pro-
fessional confidence.'*

"Of course," said Doctor Volney.

I got up from the couch. Some one had set a vase of
white roses on the centre table — a cluster of white roses,
freshly sprinkled and fragrant. I threw them far out of
the window, and then I laid myself upon the couch again.

"It will be best, Bobby," I said, "to have this cure
happen suddenly. I'm rather tired of it all, anyway.
You may go now and bring Marian in. But, oh. Doc," I
said, with a sigh, as I kicked him on the shin — " good old
Doc — it was glorious !"

xm

A MUNICIPAL REPORT

The cities are full of pride.

Challenging each to each —
This from her mountainside,

That from her burthened beach.

R. Kipling.

Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nash-
ville, Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United
States that are "story cities" — New York, of course. New
Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco. — Frank Norris.

East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to
Californians. Calif ornians are a race of people; they are
not merely inhabitants of a State. They are the South-
erners of the West. Now, Chicagoans are no less loyal
to their city; but when you ask them why, they stammer
and speak of lake fish and the new Odd Fellows Building.
But Californians go into detail.

Of course they have, in the climate, an argument that is
good for half an hour while you are thinking of your coal
bills and heavy underwear. But as soon as they come to
mistake your silence for conviction, madness comes upon
them, and they picture the city of the Golden Gate as the

147

148 Strictly Business

Bagdad of the New World. So far, as a matter of opinion,
no refutation is necessary. But, dear cousins all (from
Adam and Eve descended), it is a rash one who will lay his
finger on the map and say: "In this town there can be no
romance — what could happen here?" Yes, it is a bold
and a rash deed to challenge in one sentence history,
romance, and Rand and McNally.

Nashville. — A city, port of delivery, and the capital of the
State of Tennessee, is on the Cumberland River and on the
N. C. & St. L. and the L. & N. railroads. Thic city is regarded
as the most important educational centre in the South.

I stepped off the train at 8 p. m. Having searched the
thesaurus in vain for adjectives, I must, as a substitution,
hie me to comparison in the form of a recipe.

Take of London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts; gas
leaks 20 parts; dewdrops gathered in a brick yard at sun-
rise, 25 parts; odor of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix.

The mixture will give you an approximate conception of
a Nashville drizzle. It is not so fragrant as a moth-ball
nor as thick as pea-soup; but 'tis enough — 'twill serve.

I went to a hotel in a tumbril. It required strong self-
suppression for me to keep from climbing to the top of it
and giving an imitation of Sidney Carton. The vehicle
was drawn by beasts of a bygone era and driven by some-
thing dark and emancipated.

I was sleepy and tired, so when I got to the hotel I hur-
riedly paid it the fifty cents it demanded (with approxi-

A Municipal Report 149

mate lagniappe, I assure you). I knew its habits; and
I did not want to hear it prate about its old "marster" or
anything that happened *'befo' de wah."

The hotel was one of the kind described as "renovated."
That means $20,000 worth of new marble pillars, tiling,
electric lights and brass cuspidors in the lobby, and a new
L. & N. time table and a lithograph of Lookout Mountain
in each one of the great rooms above. The management
was without reproach, the attention full of exquisite South-
ern courtesy, the service as slow as the progress of a snail
and as good-humored as Rip Van Winkle. The food was
worth traveling a thousand miles for. There is no other
hotel in the world where you can get such chicken livers
en hrochette.

At dinner I asked a Negro waiter if there was anything
doing in town. He pondered gravely for a minute, and
then replied: "Well, boss, I don't really reckon there's
anything at all doin' after sundown."

Sundown had been accomplished; it had been drowned
in the drizzle long before. So that spectacle was denied
me. But I went forth upon the streets in the drizzle to
see what might be there.

It is built on undulating grounds; and the streets are lighted
by electricity at a cost of $32,470 p^^r annum.

As I left the hotel there was a race riot. Down upon
me charged a company of freedmen, or Arabs, or Zulus,

150 Strictly Business

armed with — no, I saw with relief that they were not
rifles, but whips. And I saw dimly a caravan of black,
clumsy vehicles; and at the reassuring shouts, "Kyar you
anywhere in the town, boss, fuh fifty cents," I reasoned
that I was merely a "fare" instead of a victim.

I walked through long streets, all leading uphill. I won-
dered how those streets ever came down again. Perhaps
they didn't until they were "graded." On a few of the
"main streets" I saw lights in stores here and there; saw
street cars go by conveying worthy burghers hither and
yon; saw people pass engaged in the art of conversation,
and heard a burst of semi-lively laughter issuing from a
soda-water and ice-cream parlor. The streets other than
"main" seemed to have enticed upon their borders houses
consecrated to peace and domesticity. In many of them
lights shone behind discreetly drawn window shades; in
a few pianos tinkled orderly and irreproachable music.
There was, indeed, little "doing." I wished I had come
before sundown. So I returned to my hotel.

In November, 1864, the Confederate General Hood advanced
against Nashville, where he shut up a National force under
General Thomas. The latter then sallied forth and defeated
the Confederates in a terrible conflict.

All my life I have heard of, admired, and witnessed the
fine marksmanship of the South in its peaceful conflicts
in the tobacco-chewing regions. But in my hotel a sur-
prise awaited me. There were twelve bright, new.

A Municipal Report 151

imposing, capacious brass cuspidors in the great lobby,
tall enough to be called urns and so wide-mouthed that
the crack pitcher of a lady baseball team should have been
able to throw a ball into one of them at five paces distant.
But, although a terrible battle had raged and was still
raging, the enemy had not suffered. Bright, new, impos-
ing, capacious, untouched, they stood. But, shades of
Jefferson Brick ! the tile floor — the beautiful tile floor !
I could not avoid thinking of the battle of Nashville, and
trying to draw, as is my foolish habit, some deductions
about hereditary marksmanship.

Here I first saw Major (by misplaced courtesy) Went-
worth Caswell. I knew him for a t}^e the moment my
eyes suffered from the sight of him. A rat has no geo-
graphical habitat. My old friend, A. Tennyson, said, as
he so well said almost everything :

Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip.
And curse me the British vermin, the rat.

Let us regard the word "British" as interchangeable
ad lib. A rat is a rat.

This man was hunting about the hotel lobby like a
starved dog that had forgotten where he had buried a bone.
He had a face of great acreage, red, pulpy, and with a kind
of sleepy massiveness like that of Buddha. He pos-
sessed one single virtue — he was very smoothly shaven .
The mark of the beast is not indelible upon a man until

152 Strictly Business

he goes about with a stubble. I think that if he had not
used his razor that day I would have repulsed his advances,
and the criminal calendar of the world would have been
spared the addition of one murder.

I happened to be standing within five feet of a cuspidor
when Major Caswell opened fire upon it. I had been
observant enough to perceive that the attacking force
was using Gatlings instead of squirrel rifles; so I side-
stepped so promptly that the major seized the opportu-
nity to apologize to a noncombatant. He had the blabbing
lip. In four minutes he had become my friend and had
dragged me to the bar.

I desire to interpolate here that I am a Southerner.
But I am not one by profession or trade. I eschew the
string tie, the slouch hat, the Prince Albert, the number
of bales of cotton destroyed by Sherman, and plug chewing.
When the orchestra plays Dixie I do not cheer. I slide
a little lower on the leather-cornered seat and, well, order
another Wiirzburger and wish that Longstreet had —
but what's the use ?

Major Caswell banged the bar with his fist, and the first
gun at Fort Sumter re-echoed. When he fired the last one
at Appomattox I began to hope. But then he began on
family trees, and demonstrated that Adam was only a
third cousin of a collateral branch of the Caswell family.
Genealogy disposed of, he took up, to my distaste, his
private family matters. He spoke of his wife, traced her

A Municipal Report 153

descent back to Eve, and profanely denied any possible
rumor that she may have had relations in the land of Nod.

By this time I began to suspect that he was trying to
obscure by noise the fact that he had ordered the drinks,
on the chance that I would be bewildered into paying for
them. But when they were down he crashed a silver
dollar loudly upon the bar. Then, of course, another
serving was obligatory. And when I had paid for that
I took leave of him brusquely; for I wanted no more of
him. But before I had obtained my release he had prated
loudly of an income that his wife received, and showed a
handful of silver money.

When I got my key at the desk the clerk said to me cour-
teously: "If that man Caswell has annoyed you, and if
you would like to make a complaint, we will have him
ejected. He is a nuisance, a loafer, and without any
known means of support, although he seems to have some
money most the time. But we don't seem to be able
to hit upon any means of throwing him out legally."

"Why, no," said I, after some reflection; "I don't see
my way clear to making a complaint. But I would like
to place myself on record as asserting that I do not care
for his company. Your town," I continued, " seems to be
a quiet one. TVTiat manner of entertainment, adventure,
or excitement have you to offer to the stranger within
your gates?"

"W^ell, sir, "said the clerk, "there will be a show here

154 Strictly Business

next Thursday. It is — I'll look it up and have the
announcement sent up to your room with the ice water.
Good night. "

After I went up to my room I looked out the window.
It was only about ten o'clock, but I looked upon a silent
town. The drizzle continued, spangled with dim lights,
as far apart as currants in a cake sold at the Ladies'
Exchange.

" A quiet place," I said to myself, as my first shoe struck
the ceiling of the occupant of the room beneath mine.
** Nothing of the life here that gives color and variety to the
cities in the East and West. Just a good, ordinary, hum-
drum, business town."

Nashville occupies a foremost place among the manufacturing
centres of the country. It is the fifth boot and shoe market in
the United States, the largest candy and cracker manufacturing
city in the South, and does an enormous wholesale drygoods,
grocery, and drug business.

I must tell you how I came to be in Nashville, and I
assure you the digression brings as much tedium to me as
it does to you. I was traveling elsewhere on my own busi-
ness, but I had a commission from a Northern literary
magazine to stop over there and establish a personal con-
nection between the publication and one of its contributors.
Azalea Adair.

Adair (there was no clue to the personality except the
handwriting) had sent in some essays (lost art !) and poems

A Municipal Report 155

that had made the editors swear approvingly over their
one o'clock luncheon. So they had commissioned me to
round up said Adair and corner by contract his or her
output at two cents a word before some other publisher
offered her ten or twenty.

At nine o'clock the next morning, after my chicken
livers en brochette (try them if you can find that hotel), I
strayed out into the drizzle, which was still on for an
unlimited run. At the first corner I came upon Uncle
Csesar. He was a stalwart Negro, older than the pyra-
mids, with gray wool and a face that reminded me of
Brutus, and a second afterwards of the late King Cetti-
wayo. He wore the most remarkable coat that I ever
had seen or expect to see. It reached to his ankles and
had once been a Confederate gray in colors. But rain
and sun and age had so variegated it that Joseph's coat,
beside it, would have faded to a pale monochrome. I
must linger with that coat, for it has to do with the story
— the story that is so long in coming, because you can
hardly expect anything to happen in Nashville.

Once it must have been the military coat of an officer.
The cape of it had vanished, but all adown its front it had
been frogged and tasseled magnificently. But now the
frogs and tassels were gone. In their stead had been
patiently stitched (I surmised by some surviving *' black
mammy") new frogs made of cunningly twisted common
hempen twine. This twine was frayed and disheveled.

156 Strictly Business

It must have been added to the coat as a substitute for
vanished splendors, v^^ith tasteless but painstaking devo-
tion, for it followed faithfully the curves of the long-missing
frogs. And, to complete the comedy and pathos of the
garment, all its buttons were gone save one. The sec-
ond button from the top alone remained. The coat was
fastened by other twine strings tied through the button-
holes and other holes rudely pierced in the opposite side.
There was never such a weird garment so fantastically
bedecked and of so many mottled hues. The lone button
was the size of a half-dollar, made of yellow horn and
sewed on with coarse twine.

This Negro stood by a carriage so old that Ham him-
self might have started a hack line with it after he left
the ark with the two animals hitched to it. As I approached
he threw open the door, drew out a feather duster, waved
it without using it, and said in deep, rumbling tones :

"Step right in, suh; ain't a speck of dust in it — jus' got
back from a funeral, suh."

I inferred that on such gala occasions carriages wei»e
given an extra cleaning. I looked up and down the street
and perceived that there was little choice among the vehi-
cles for hire that lined the curb. I looked in my memo-
randum book for the address of Azalea Adair.

"I want to go to 861 Jessamine Street," I said, and was
about to step into the hack. But for an instant the thick,
long, gorilla-like arm of the old Negro barred me. On

A Municipal Report 157

his massive and saturnine face a look of sudden suspicion
and enmity flashed for a moment. Then, with quickly
returning conviction, he asked blandishingly: "What are
you gwine there for, boss ?"

"What is that to you ?" I asked, a little sharply.

"Nothin', suh, jus' nothin'. Only it's a lonesome kind
of part of town and few folks ever has business out there.
Step right in. The seats is clean — jes' got back from a
funeral, suh."

A mile and a half it must have been to our journey's end.
I could hear nothing but the fearful rattle of the ancient
hack over the uneven brick paving; I could smell nothing
but the drizzle, now further flavored with coal smoke and
something like a mixture of tar and oleander blossoms.
All I could see through the streaming windows were two
rows of dim houses.

The city has an area of 10 square miles; 181 miles of streets,
of which 137 miles are paved; a system of waterworks that cost
$2,000,000, with 77 miles of mains.

Eight-sixty-one Jessamine Street was a decayed man-
sion. Thirty yards back from the street it stood, out-
merged in a splendid grove of trees and untrimmed shrub-
bery. A row of box bushes overflowed and almost hid the
paling fence from sight; the gate was kept closed by a rope
noose that encircled the gate post and the first paling of
the gate. But when you got inside you saw that 861

158 Strictly Business

was a shell, a shadow, a ghost of former grandeur and
excellence. But in the story, I have not yet got inside.

When the hack had ceased from rattling and the weary
quadrupeds came to a rest I handed my jehu his fifty cents
with an additional quarter, feeling a glow of conscious
generosity, as I did so. He refused it.

"It's two dollars, suh," he said.

"How's that?" I asked. "I plainly heard you call out
at the hotel : * Fifty cents to any part of the town. ' "

"It's two dollars, suh," he repeated obstinately. "It's
a long ways from the hotel."

"It is within the city limits and well within them," I
argued. "Don't think that you have picked up a green-
horn Yankee. Do you see those hills over there ?" I went
on, pointing toward the east (I could not see them, myself,
for the drizzle) ; "well, I was born and raised on their other
side. You old fool nigger, can't you tell people from
other people when you see 'em?"

The grim face of King Cettiwayo softened. "Is you
from the South, suh? I reckon it was them shoes of
yourn fooled me. They is somethin' sharp in the toes for
a Southern gen'l'man to wear."

"Then the charge is fifty cents, I suppose?" said I
inexorably.

His former expression, a mingling of cupidity and hos-
tility, returned, remained ten seconds, and vanished.

"Boss," he said, "fifty cents is right; but I needs two

A Municipal Report 159

dollars, suh; I'm obleeged to have two dollars. I ain't
demandin' it now, suh; after I knows whar you's from;
I'm jus' sayin' that I has to have two dollars to-night, and
business is mighty po'."

Peace and confidence settled upon his heavy features.
He had been luckier than he had hoped. Instead of
having picked up a greenhorn, ignorant of rates, he had
come upon an inheritance.

" You confounded old rascal," I said, reaching down into
my pocket, "you ought to be turned over to the police."

For the first time I saw him smile. He knew; he knew;
HE KNEW.

I gave him two one-dollar bills. As I handed them over
I noticed that one of them had seen parlous times. Its
upper right-hand corner was missing, and it had been
torn through in the middle, but joined again. A strip
of blue tissue paper, pasted over the split, preserved its
negotiability.

Enough of the African bandit for the present: I left him
happy, lifted the rope and opened the creaky gate.

The house, as I said, was a shell. A paint brush had
not touched it in twenty years. I could not see why a
strong wind should not have bowled it over like a house of
cards until I looked again at the trees that hugged it close —
the trees that saw the battle of Nashville and still drew
their protecting branches around it against storm and
enemy and cold.

160 Strictly Business

Azalea Adair, fifty years old, white-haired, a descend-
ant of the cavaHers, as thin and frail as the house she lived
in, robed in the cheapest and cleanest dress I ever saw.
with an air as simple as a queen's, received me.

The reception room seemed a mile square, because there
was nothing in it except some rows of books, on unpainted
white-pine bookshelves, a cracked marble-top table, a rag
rug, a hairless horsehair sofa and two or three chairs. Yes,
there was a picture on the wall, a colored crayon drawing
of a cluster of pansies. I looked around for the portrait
of Andrew Jackson and the pine-cone hanging basket
but they were not there.

Azalea Adair and I had conversation, a little of which
will be repeated to you. She was a product of the old
South, gently nurtured in the sheltered life. Her learn-
ing was not broad, but was deep and of splendid original-
ity in its somewhat narrow scope. She had been educated
at home, and her knowledge of the world was derived
from inference and by inspiration. Of such is the preci-
ous, small group of essayists made. While she talked to
me I kept brushing my fingers, trying, unconsciously, to
rid them guiltily of the absent dust from the half-calf backs
of Lamb, Chaucer, Hazlitt, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne
and Hood. She was exquisite, she was a valuable dis-
covery. Nearly everybody nowadays knows too much —
oh, so much too much — of real life.

I could perceive clearly that Azalea Adair was very poor.

A Municipal Report 161

A house and a dress she had, not much else, I fancied.
So, divided between my duty to the magazine and my
loyalty to the poets and essayists who fought Thomas in
the valley of the Cumberland, I listened to her voice, which
was like a harpsichord's, and found that I could not speak
of contracts. In the presence of the nine Muses and the
three Graces one hesitated to lower the topic to two cents.
There would have to be another colloquy after I had
regained my commercialism. But I spoke of my mission,
and three o'clock of the next afternoon was set for the dis-
cussion of the business proposition.

" Your town," I said, as I began to make ready to depart
(which is the time for smooth generalities), "seems to be
a quiet, sedate place. A home town, I should say, where
few things out of the ordinarj^ ever happen."

It carries on an extensive trade in stoves and hollow ware with
the West and South, and its flouring mills have a daily capacity
of more than 2,000 barrels.

Azalea Adair seemed to reflect.

"I have never thought of it that way," she said, with a
kind of sincere intensity that seemed to belong to her.
" Isn't it in the still, quiet places that things do happen ?
I fancy that when God began to create the earth on the
first Monday morning one could have leaned out one's
window and heard the drops of mud splashing from His
trowel as He built up the everlasting hills. What did the
noisiest project in the world — I mean the building of the

16^ Strictly Business

tower of Babel — result in finally ? A page and a half of
Esperanto in the North American Review.'*

*'Pf course," said I platitudinously, "human nature
is the same everywhere ; but there is more color — er —
more drama and movement and — er — romance in some
cities than in others."

" On the surface," said Azalea Adair. ** I have traveled
many times around the world in a golden airship wafted
on two wings — print and dreams. I have seen (on one
of my imaginary tours) the Sultan of Turkey bowstring
with his own hands one of his wives who had uncovered
her face in public. I have seen a man in Nashville tear
up his theatre tickets because his wife was going out with
her face covered — with rice powder. In San Francisco's
Chinatown I saw the slave girl Sing Yee dipped slowly,
inch by inch, in boiling almond oil to make her swear she
would never see her American lover again. She gave in
when the boiling oil had reached three inches above her
knee. At a euchre party in East Nashville the other night
I saw Kitty Morgan cut dead by seven of her schoolmates
and lifelong friends because she had married a house
painter. The boiling oil was sizzling as high as her
heart; but I wish you could have seen the fine little smile
that she carried from table to table. Oh, yes, it is a
humdrum town. Just a few miles of red brick houses
and mud and stores and lumber yards."

Some one knocked hollowly at the back of the house.

A Municipal Report 163

Azalea Adair breathed a soft apology and went to inves-
tigate the sound. She came back in three minutes with
brightened eyes, a faint flush on her cheeks, and ten years
lifted from her shoulders.

"You must have a cup of tea before you go," she said,
"and a sugar cake."

She reached and shook a little iron bell. In shuffled a
small Negro girl about twelve, barefoot, not very tidy,
glowering at me with thumb in mouth and bulging eyes.

Azalea Adair opened a tiny, worn purse and drew out
a dollar bill, a dollar bill with the upper right-hand corner
missing, torn in two pieces and pasted together again with
a strip of blue tissue paper. It was one of the bills I had
given the piratical Negro — there was no doubt of it.

" Go up to Mr. Baker's store on the corner, Impy," she
said, handing the girl the dollar bill, "and get a quarter
of a pound of tea — the kind he always sends me — and
ten cents worth of sugar cakes. Now, hurry. The sup-
ply of tea in the house happens to be exhausted," she
explained to me.

Impy left by the back way. Before the scrape of her
hard, bare feet had died away on the back porch, a wild
shriek — I was sure it was hers — filled the hollow house.
Then the deep, gruff tones of an angry man's voice mingled
with the girl's further squeals and unintelligible words.

Azalea Adair rose without surprise or emotion and dis-
appeared. For two minutes I heard the hoarse rumble

164 Strictly Business

of the man's voice; then something like an oath and a
slight scuffle, and she returned calmly to her chair.

"This is a roomy house," she said, '*and I have a ten-
ant for part of it. I am sorry to have to rescind my invi-
tation to tea. It was impossible to get the kind I always
use at the store. Perhaps to-morrow Mr. Baker will be
able to supply me."

I was sure that Impy had not had time to leave the
house. I inquired concerning street-car lines and took
my leave. After I was well on my way I remembered that
I had not learned Azalea Adair's name. But to-morrow
would do.

That same day I started in on the course of iniquity
that this uneventful city forced upon me. I was in
the town only two days, but in that time I managed
to lie shamelessly by telegraph, and to be an accom-
plice — after the fact, if that is the correct legal term — to
a murder.

As I rounded the corner nearest my hotel the Afrite
coachman of the polychromatic, nonpareil coat seized me,
swung open the dungeony door of his peripatetic sarco-
phagus, flirted his feather duster and began his ritual:
" Step right in, boss. Carriage is clean — jus' got back
from a funeral. Fifty cents to any "

And then he knew me and grinned broadly. " 'Scuse
me, boss; you is de gen'l'man what rid out with me dis
mawnin'. Thank you kindly, suh."

A Municipal Report 165

"I am going out to 861 again to-morrow afternoon at
three," said I, "and if you will be here, I'll let you drive
me. So you know Miss Adair?" I concluded, thinking
of my dollar bill.

" I belonged to her father, Judge Adair, suh," he replied.

"I judge that she is pretty poor," I said. "She hasn't
much money to speak of, has she ? "

For an instant I looked again at the fierce countenance
of King Cettiwayo, and then he changed back to an extor-
tionate old Negro hack driver.

"She ain't gwine to starve, suh," he said slowly. "She
has reso'ces, suh; she has reso'ces."

" I shall pay you fifty cents for the trip," said I.

"Dat is puffeckly correct, suh," he answered humbly.
"I jus' had to have dat two dollars dis mawnin', boss."

I went to the hotel and lied by electricity. I
wired the magazine: "A. Adair holds out for eight
cents a word."

The answer that came back was : " Give it to her quick,
you duffer."

Just before dinner "Major" Wentworth Caswell bore
down upon me with the greetings of a long-lost friend. I
have seen few men whom I have so instantaneously hated,
and of whom it was so difficult to be rid. I was standing
at the bar when he invaded me; therefore I could not wave
the white ribbon in his face. I would have paid gladly
for the drinks, hoping, thereby, to escape another; but

1G6 Strictly Business

he was one of those despicable, roaring, advertising bib-
bers who must have brass bands and fireworks attend upon
every cent that they waste in their foHies.

With an air of producing millions he drew two one-
dollar bills from a pocket and dashed one of them upon the
bar. I looked once more at the dollar bill with the upper
right-hand corner missing, torn through the middle, and
patched with a strip of blue tissue paper. It was my
dollar bill again. It could have been no other.

I went up to my room. The drizzle and the monotony
of a dreary, eventless Southern town had made me tired
and listless. I remember that just before I went to bed I
mentally disposed of the mysterious dollar bill (which
might have formed the clew to a tremendously fine detec-
tive story of San Francisco) by saying to myself sleepily:
" Seems as if a lot of people here own stock in the Hack-
Driver's Trust. Pays dividends promptly, too. Won-
der if " Then I fell asleep.

King Cettiwayo was at his post the next day, and rattled
my bones over the stones out to 861. He was to wait and
rattle me back again when I was ready.

Azalea Adair looked paler and cleaner and frailer than
she had looked on the day before. After she had signed
the contract at eight cents per word she grew still paler
and began to slip out of her chair. Without much trouble
I managed to get her up on the antediluvian horsehair
sofa and then I ran out to the sidewalk and yelled to the

A Municipal Report 167

coffee-colored Pirate to bring a doctor. With a wisdom
that I had not suspected in him, he abandoned his team
and struck off up the street afoot, realizing the value of
speed. In ten minutes he returned with a grave, gray-
haired and capable man of medicine. In a few words
(worth much less than eight cents each) I explained to
him my presence in the hollow house of mystery. He
bowed with stately understanding, and turned to the
old Negro.

*' Uncle Caesar," he said calmly, "run up to my house
and ask Miss Lucy to give you a cream pitcher full of fresh
milk and half a tumbler of port wine. And hurry back.
Don't drive — run. I want you to get back sometime
this week."

It occurred to me that Dr. Merriman also felt a distrust
as to the speeding powers of the land-pirate's steeds. After
Uncle Csesar was gone, lumberingly, but swiftly, up the
street, the doctor looked me over with great politeness and
as much careful calculation until he had decided that I
might do.

"It is only a case of insufficient nutrition," he said.
"In other words, the result of poverty, pride, and starva-
tion. Mrs. Caswell has many devoted friends who would
be glad to aid her, but she will accept nothing except
from that old Negro, Uncle Csesar, who was once owned
by her family."

" Mrs, Caswell ! " said I, in surprise. And then I looked

168 Strictly Business

at the contract and saw that she had signed it "Azalea
Adair Caswell."

"I thought she was Miss Adair," I said.

"Married to a drunken, worthless loafer, sir," said the
doctor. "It is said that he robs her even of the small
sums that her old servant contributes toward her support."

When the milk and wine had been brought the doctor
soon revived Azalea Adair. She sat up and talked of the
beauty of the autumn leaves that were then in season, and
their height of color. She referred lightly to her fainting
seizure as the outcome of an old palpitation of the heart.
Impy fanned her as she lay on the sofa. The doctor was
due elsewhere, and I followed him to the door. I told
him that it was within my power and intentions to make
a reasonable advance of money to Azalea Adair on future
contributions to the magazine, and he seemed pleased.

"By the way," he said, "perhaps you would like to
know that you have had royalty for a coachman. Old
Caesar's grandfather was a king in Congo. Caesar him-
self has royal ways, as you may have observed."

As the doctor was moving off I heard Uncle Caesar's
voice inside: "Did he git bofe of dem two dollars from
you. Mis' Zalea ? "

"Yes, Caesar," I heard Azalea Adair answer weakly.
And then I went in and concluded business negotiations
with our contributor. I assumed the responsibility of
advancing fifty dollars, putting it as a necessary formality

A Municipal Report 169

in binding our bargain. And then Uncle Caesar drove
me back to the hotel.

Here ends all of the story as far as I can testify
as a witness. The rest must be only bare statements
of facts.

At about six o'clock I went out for a stroll. Uncle
Caesar was at his corner. He threw open the door of his
carriage, flourished his duster and began his depressing
formula: "Step right in, suh. Fifty cents to anywhere
in the city — hack's puflBckly clean, suh — jus' got back
from a funeral "

And then he recognized me. I think his eyesight was
getting bad. His coat had taken on a few more faded
shades of color, the twine strings were more frayed and
ragged, the last remaining button — the button of yellow
horn — was gone. A motley descendant of kings was
Uncle Caesar!

About two hours later I saw an excited crowd besieging
the front of a drug store. In a desert where nothing hap-
pens this was manna; so I edged my way inside. On an
extemporized couch of empty boxes and chairs was
stretched the mortal corporeality of Major Wentworth
Caswell. A doctor was testing him for the immortal ingre-
dient. His decision was that it was conspicuous by its
absence.

The erstwhile Major had been found dead on a dark
street and brought by curious and ennuied citizens to the

170 Strictly Business

drug store. The late human being had been engaged in
terrific battle — the details showed that. Loafer and
reprobate though he had been, he had been also a warrior.
But he had lost. His hands were yet clinched so tightly
that his fingers would not be opened. The gentle citizens
who had known him stood about and searched their
v^ocabularies to find some good words, if it were possible,
to speak of him. One kind-looking man said, after much
thought : " When * Cas ' was about fo'teen he was one of the
best spellers in school."

While I stood there the fingers of the right hand of " the
man that was," which hung down the side of a white pine
box, relaxed, and dropped something at my feet. I cov-
ered it with one foot quietly, and a little later on I picked
it up and pocketed it. I reasoned that in his last struggle
his hand must have seized that object uuAvittingly and
held it in a death grip.

At the hotel that night the main topic of conversation,
with the possible exceptions of politics and prohibition,
was the demise of Major Caswell. I heard one man say
to a group of listeners :

"In my opinion, gentlemen, Caswell was murdered by
some of these no-account niggers for his money. He had
fifty dollars this afternoon which he showed to several
gentlemen in the hotel. When he was found the money
was not on his person."

I left the city the next morning at nine, and as the train

A Municipal Report 171

was crossing the bridge over the Cumberland River I took
out of my pocket a yellow horn overcoat button the size
of a fifty-cent piece, with frayed ends of coarse twine hang-
ing from it, and cast it out of the window into the slow,
muddy waters below.

/ wonder whafs doing in Buffalo! <

XIV

PSYCHE AND THE PSKYSCRAPER

If you are a philosopher you can do this thing: you can
go to the top of a high building, look down upon your fel-
low-men 300 feet below, and despise them as insects. Like
the irresponsible black waterbugs on summer ponds, they
crawl and circle and hustle about idiotically without aim
or purpose. They do not even move with the admirable
intelligence of ants, for ants always know when they are
going home. The ant is of a lowly station, but he will
often reach home and get his slippers on while you are left
at your elevated station.

Man, then, to the housetopped philosopher, appears
to be but a creeping, contemptible beetle. Brokers, poets,
millionaires, bootblacks, beauties, hod-carriers and poli-
ticians become little black specks dodging bigger black
specks in streets no wider than your thumb.

From this high view the city itself becomes degraded
to an unintelligible mass of distorted buildings and impos-
sible perspectives; the revered ocean is a duck pond; the
earth itself a lost golf ball. All the minutiae of life are
gone. The philosopher gazes into the infinite heavens

172

Psyche and the Pskyscraper 173

above him, and allows his soul to expand to the influence
of his new view. He feels that he is the heir to Eternity
and the child of Time. Space, too, should be his by the
right of his immortal heritage, and he thrills at the thought
that some day his kind shall traverse those mysterious
aerial roads between planet and planet. The tiny world
beneath his feet upon which this towering structure of steel
rests as a speck of dust upon a Himalayan mountain — ■- it
is but one of a countless number of such whirling atoms.
What are the ambitions, the achievements, the paltry con-
quests and loves of those restless black insects below
compared with the serene and awful immensity of the uni-
verse that lies above and around their insignificant city ?

It is guaranteed that the philosopher will have these
thoughts. They have been expressly compiled from the
philosophies of the world and set down with the proper
interrogation point at the end of them to represent the
invariable musings of deep thinkers on high places. And
when the philosopher takes the elevator down his mind is
broader, his heart is at peace, and his conception of the
cosmogony of creation is as wide as the buckle of Orion's
summer belt.

But if your name happened to be Daisy, and you worked
in an Eighth Avenue candy store and lived in a little cold
hall bedroom, five feet by eight, and earned $6 per week,
and ate ten-cent lunches and were nineteen years old,
and got up at G.30 and worked till 9, and never had

174 Strictly Business

studied philosophy, maybe things wouldn't look that
way to you from the top of a skyscraper.

Two sighed for the hand of Daisy, the unphilosophical.
One was Joe, who kept the smallest store in New York.
It was about the size of a tool-box of the D. P. W., and
was stuck like a swallow's nest against a corner of a down-
town skyscraper. Its stock consisted of fruit, candies,
newspapers, song books, cigarettes, and lemonade in
season. When stern winter shook his congealed locks and
Joe had to move himself and the fruit inside, there was
exactly room in the store for the proprietor, his wares,
a stove the size of a vinegar cruet, and one customer.

Joe was not of the nation that keeps us forever in a
furore with fugues and fruit. He was a capable American
youth who was laying by money, and wanted Daisy to help
him spend it. Three times he had asked her.

" I got money saved up, Daisy," was his love song; " and
you know how bad I want you. That store of mine ain't
very big, but "

'* Oh, ain't it ? " would be the antiphony of the unphilo-
sophical one. "Why, I heard Wanamaker's was trying
to get you to sublet part of your floor space to them for
next year."

Daisy passed Joe's corner every morning and evening.

" Hello, Two-by-Four ! " was her usual greeting. " Seems
to me your store looks emptier. You must have sold a
package of chewing gum."

Psyche and the P sky scraper 175

"Ain't much room in here, sure," Joe would answer,
with his slow grin, "except for you, Daise. Me and the
store are waitin' for you whenever you'll take us. Don't
you think you might before long ? "

"Store!" — a fine scorn was expressed by Daisy's
uptilted nose — " sardine box ! Waitin' for me, you say ?
Gee ! you'd have to throw out about a hundred pounds of
candy before I could get inside of it, Joe."

"I wouldn't mind an even swap like that," said Joe,
complimentary.

Daisy's existence was limited in every way. She had
to walk sideways between the counter and the shelves in
the candy store. In her own hall bedroom coziness had
been carried close to cohesiveness. The walls were so
near to one another that the paper on them made a perfect
Babel of noise. She could light the gas with one hand
and close the door with the other without taking her eyes
off the reflection of her brown pompadour in the mirror.
She had Joe's picture in a gilt frame on the dresser, and
sometimes — but her next thought would always be of
Joe's funny little store tacked like a soap box to the corner
of that great building, and away would go her sentiment
in a breeze of laughter.

Daisy's other suitor followed Joe by several months.
He came to board in the house where she lived. His name
was Dabster, and he was a philosopher. Though young,
attainments stood out upon him like continental labels on

176 Strictly Business

a Passaic (N. J.) suit-case. Knowledge he had kidnapped
from cyclopedias and handbooks of useful information;
but as for wisdom, when she passed he was left sniffing in
the road without so much as the number of her motor car.
He could and would tell you the proportion of water and
muscle-making properties of peas and veal, the shortest
verse in the Bible, the number of pounds of shingle nails
required to fasten 9.5Q shingles laid four inches to the
weather, the population of Kankakee, 111., the theories of
Spinoza, the name of Mr. H. McKay Twombly's second
hall footman, the length of the Hoosac Tunnel, the best
time to set a hen, the salary of the railway post-office mes-
senger between Driftwood and Red Bank Furnace, Pa.,
and the number of bones in the foreleg of a cat.

This weight of learning was no handicap to Dabster.
His statistics were the sprigs of parsley with which he gar-
nished the feast of small talk that he would set before you
if he conceived that to be your taste. And again he used
them as breastworks in foraging at the boarding-house.
Firing at you a volley of figures concerning the weight
of a lineal foot of bar-iron 5 x 2f inches, and the average
annual rainfall at Fort Snelling, Minn., he would transfix
with his fork the best piece of chicken on the dish while
you were trying to rally sufficiently to ask him weakly
why does a hen cross the road.

Thus, brightly armed, and further equipped with a
measure of good looks, of a hair-oily, shopping-district-

Psyche and the P sky scraper 177

at-three-in-the-afternoon kind, it seems that Joe, of the
LilHputian emporium, had a rival worthy of his steel.
But Joe carried no steel. There wouldn't have been room
in his store to draw it if he had.

One Saturday afternoon, about four o'clock, Daisy and
Mr. Dabster stopped before Joe's booth. Dabster w^ore
a silk hat, and — well, Daisy was a woman, and that hat
had no chance to get back in its box until Joe had seen it.
A stick of pineapple chewing gum was the ostensible object
of the call. Joe supplied it through the open side of his
store. He did not pale or falter at sight of the hat.

" Mr. Dabster's going to take me on top of the building
to observe the view," said Daisy, after she had introduced
her admirers. " I never was on a skyscraper. I guess it
must be awful nice and funny up there."

"H'm!"said Joe.

"The panorama," said Mr. Dabster, "exposed to the
gaze from the top of a lofty building is not only sublime,
but instructive. Miss Daisy has a decided pleasure in
store for her."

"It's windy up there, too, as well as here," said Joe.
" Are you dressed warm enough, Daise ? "

"Sure thing! I'm all lined," said Daisy, smiling slyly
at his clouded brow. " You look just like a mummy in a
case, Joe. Ain't you just put in an invoice of a pint of
peanuts or another apple ? Your store looks awful over-
stocked."

178 Strictly Business

Daisy giggled at her favorite joke; and Joe had to smile
with her.

" Your quarters are somewhat limited, Mr. — er — er,'*
remarked Dabster, "in comparison with the size of this
building. I understand the area of its side to be about 340
by 100 feet. That would make you occupy a proportionate
space as if half of Beloochistan were placed upon a territory
as large as the United States east of the Rocky Mountains,
with the Province of Ontario and Belgium added."

"Is that so, sport?" said Joe, genially. "You are
Weisenheimer on figures, all right. How many square
pounds of baled hay do you think a jackass could eat if he
stopped brayin' long enough to keep still a minute and
five eighths ? "

A few minutes later Daisy and Mr. Dabster stepped
from an elevator to the top floor of the skyscraper. Then
up a short, steep stairway and out upon the roof. Dabster
led her to the parapet so she could look down at the black
dots moving in the street below.

"What are they?" she asked, trembling. She had
never before been on a height like this before.

And then Dabster must needs play the philosopher on
the tower, and conduct her soul forth to meet the immen-
sity of space.

"Bipeds," he said, solemnly. "See what they become
even at the small elevation of 340 feet — mere crawling
insects going to and fro at random."

Psyche and the Pskyscraper 179

" Oh, they ain't anything of the kind," exclaimed Daisy,
suddenly — " they're folks ! I saw an automobile. Oh,
gee ! are we that high up ? "

"Walk over this way," said Dabster.

He showed her the great city lying like an orderly array
of toys far below, starred here and there, early as it was,
by the first beacon lights of the winter afternoon. And
then the bay and sea to the south and east vanishing mys-
teriously into the sky.

"I don't like it," declared Daisy, with troubled blue
eyes, "Say we go down."

But the philosopher was not to be denied his oppor-
tunity. He would let her behold the grandeur of his mind,
the half-nelson he had on the infinite, and the memory he
had for statistics. And then she would nevermore be con-
tent to buy chewing gum at the smallest store in New York.
And so he began to prate of the smallness of human affairs,
and how that even so slight a removal from earth made
man and his works look like the tenth part of a dollar
thrice computed. And that one should consider the
sidereal system and the maxims of Epictetus and be
comforted.

"You don't carry me with you," said Daisy. "Say, I
think it's awful to be up so high that folks look like fleas.
One of them we saw might have been Joe. Why, Jiminy ! we
might as well be in New Jersey ! Say, I'm afraid up here ! "

The philosopher smiled fatuously.

180 Strictly Business

" The earth," said he, " is itself only as a grain of wheat
in space. Look up there."

Daisy gazed upward apprehensively. The short day
was spent and the stars were coming out above.

"Yonder star," said Dabster, "is Venus, the evening
star. She is 66,000,000 miles from the sun."

" Fudge ! " said Daisy, with a brief flash of spirit, " where
do you think I come from — Brooklyn ? Susie Price, in
our store — her brother sent her a ticket to go to San Fran-
cisco — that's only three thousand miles."

The philosopher smiled indulgently.

" Our world," he said, " is 91,000,000 miles from the sun.
There are eighteen stars of the first magnitude that are
211,000 times further from us than the sun is. If one of
them should be extinguished it would be three years before
we would see its light go out. There are six thousand stars
of the sixth magnitude. It takes thirty-six years for the
light of one of them to reach the earth. With an eight-
teen-foot telescope we can see 43,000,000 stars, including
those of the thirteenth magnitude, whose light takes 2,700
years to reach us. Each of these stars "

"You're lyin', " cried Daisy, angrily. "You're tryin*
to scare me. And you have; I want to go down!"

She stamped her foot.

" Arcturus " began the philosopher, soothingly, but

he was interrupted by a demonstration out of the vastness
of the nature that he was endeavoring to portray with his

Psyche and the P skyscraper 181

memory Instead of his heart. For to the heart-expounder
of nature the stars were set in the firmament expressly to
give soft Hght to lovers wandering happily beneath them;
and if you stand tiptoe some September night with your
sweetheart on your arm you can almost touch them with
your hand. Three years for their light to reach us, indeed !

Out of the west leaped a meteor, lighting the roof of the
skyscraper almost to midday. Its fiery parabola was
limned against the sky toward the east. It hissed as it
went, and Daisy screamed.

*'Take me down," she cried vehemently, '*you — you
mental arithmetic ! "

Dabster got her to the elevator, and inside of it. She
was wild-eyed, and she shuddered when the express made
its debilitating drop.

Outside the revolving door of the skyscraper the philoso-
pher lost her. She vanished; and he stood, bewildered,
without figures or statistics to aid him.

Joe had a lull in trade, and by squirming among his
stock succeeded in lighting a cigarette and getting one cold
foot against the attentuated stove.

The door was burst open, and Daisy, laughing, crying,
scattering fruit and candies, tumbled into his arms.

" Oh, Joe, I've been up on the skyscraper. Ain*t it cozy
and warm and homelike in here! I'm ready for you, Joe,
whenever you want me."

XV

A BIRD OF BAGDAD

Without doubt much of the spirit and genius of the
Caliph Harun Al Rashid descended to the Margrave
August Michael von Paulsen Quigg.

Quigg's restaurant is in Fourth Avenue — that street
that the city seems to have forgotten in its growth. Fourth
Avenue — born and bred in the Bowery — staggers north-
ward full of good resolutions.

Where it crosses Fourteenth Street it struts for a brief
moment proudly in the glare of the museums and cheap
theatres. It may yet become a fit mate for its high-
born sister boulevard to the west, or its roaring, polyglot,
broad-waisted cousin to the east. It passes Union
Square; and here the hoofs of the dray horses seem to
thunder in unison, recalling the tread of marching hosts
— Hooray ! But now come the silent and terrible moun-
tains — buildings square as forts, high as the clouds, shut-
ting out the sky, where thousands of slaves bend over
desks all day. On the ground floors are only little fruit
shops and laundries and book shops, where you see copies
of " Littell's Living Age " and G. W. M. Reynolds's novels

182

A Bird of Bagdad 183

in the windows. And next — poor Fourth Avenue ! —
the street glides into a mediaeval solitude. On each side
are the shops devoted to "Antiques."

Let us say it is night. Men in rusty armor stand in
the windows and menace the hurrying cars with raised,
rusty iron gauntlets. Hauberks and helms, blunder-
busses, Cromwellian breastplates, matchlocks, creeses,
and the swords and daggers of an army of dead-and-gone
gallants gleam dully in the ghostly light. Here and there
from a corner saloon (lit with Jack-o'-lanterns or phos-
phorus), stagger forth shuddering, home-bound citizens,
nerved by the tankards within to their fearsome journey
adown that eldrich avenue lined with the blood-stained
weapons of the fighting dead. What street could live
inclosed by these mortuary relics, and trod by these
spectral citizens in whose sunken hearts scarce one good
whoop or tra-la-la remained ?

Not Fourth Avenue. Not after the tinsel but enliven-
ing glories of the Little Rialto — not after the echoing
drum - beats of Union Square. There need be no
tears, ladies and gentlemen; 'tis but the suicide of
a street. With a shriek and a crash Fourth Avenue
dives headlong into the tunnel at Thirty-fourth and is
never seen again.

Near the sad scene of the thoroughfare's dissolution
stood the modest restaurant of Quigg. It stands there
yet if you care to view its crumbling red-brick front, its

184 Strictly Business

show window heaped with oranges, tomatoes, layer cakes,
pies, canned asparagus — its papier-mache lobster and
two Maltese kittens asleep on a bunch of lettuce — if you
care to sit at one of the little tables upon whose cloth has
been traced in the yellowest of coffee stains the trail of the
Japanese advance — to sit there with one eye on your
umbrella and the other upon the bogus bottle from which
you drop the counterfeit sauce foisted upon us by the
cursed charlatan who assumes to be our dear old lord and
friend, the "Nobleman in India."

Quigg's title came through his mother. One of her
ancestors was a Margravine of Saxony. His father was
a Tammany brave. On account of the dilution of his
heredity he found that he could neither become a reigning
potentate nor get a job in the City Hall. So he opened
a restaurant. He was a man full of thought and reading.
The business gave him a living, though he gave it little
attention. One side of his house bequeathed to him a
poetic and romantic nature. The other gave him the
restless spirit that made him seek adventure. By day he
was Quigg, the restaurateur. By night he was the Mar-
grave — the Caliph — the Prince of Bohemia — going
about the city in search of the odd, the mysterious, the
inexplicable, the recondite.

One night at 9, at which hour the restaurant closed,
Quigg set forth upon his quest. There was a mingling
of the foreign, the military and the artistic in his appear-

A Bird of Bagdad 185

ance as he buttoned his coat high up under his short-
trimmed brown and gray beard and turned westward
toward the more central life conduits of the city. In his
pocket he had stored an assortment of cards, written upon,
without which he never stirred out of doors. Each of
those cards was good at his own restaurant for its face
value. Some called simply for a bowl of soup or sand-
wiches and coffee ; others entitled their bearer to one, two,
three or more days of full meals; a few were for single
regular meals; a very few were, in effect, meal tickets
good for a week.

Of riches and power Margrave Quigg had none; but
he had a Caliph's heart — it may be forgiven him if his
head fell short of the measure of Harun Al Rashid's.
Perhaps some of the gold pieces in Bagdad had put less
warmth and hope into the complainants among the bazaars
than had Quigg's beef stew among the fishermen and one-
eyed calenders of Manhattan.

Continuing his progress in search of romance to divest
him, or of distress that he might aid, Quigg became aware
cf a fast-gathering crowd that whooped and fought and
eddied at a corner of Broadway and the crosstown street
that he was traversing. Hurrying to the spot he beheld
a young man of an exceedingly melancholy and pre-
occupied demeanor engaged in the pastime of casting
silver money from his pockets to the middle of the street.
With each motion of the generous one's hand the crowd

186 Strictly Business

huddled upon the falling largesse with yells of joy. Traffic
was suspended. A policeman in the centre of the mob
stooped often to the ground as he urged the blockaders
to move on.

The Margrave saw at a glance that here was food for
his hunger after knowledge concerning abnormal workings
of the human heart. He made his way swiftly to the
young man's side and took his arm. "Come with me at
once," he said, in the low but commanding voice that his
waiters had learned to fear.

"Pinched," remarked the young man, looking up at
him with expressionless eyes. "Pinched by a painless
dentist. Take me away, flatty, and give me gas. Some
lay eggs and some lay none. When is a hen.^"

Still deeply seized by some inward grief, but tractable,
he allowed Quigg to lead him away and down the street to
a little park.

There, seated on a bench, he upon whom a corner of
the great Caliph's mantle has descended, spake with
kindness and discretion, seeking to know what evil had
come upon the other, disturbing his soul and driving him
to such ill-considered and ruinous waste of his substance
and stores.

"I was doing the Monte Cristo act as adapted by
Pompton, N. J., wasn't I ?" asked the young man.

"You were throwing small coins into the street for the
people to scramble after," said the Margrave.

A Bird of Bagdad 187

"That's it. You buy all the beer you can hold, and

then you throw chicken feed to Oh, curse that word

chicken, and hens, feathers, roosters, eggs, and everything
connected with it!'*

"Young sir," said the Margrave kindly, but with
dignity, "though I do not ask your confidence, I invite it.
I know the world and I know humanity. Man is my
study, though I do not eye him as the scientist eyes a beetle
or as the philanthropist gazes at the objects of his bounty
— through a veil of theory and igj^orance. It is my
pleasure and distraction to interest myself in the peculiar
and complicated misfortunes that life in a great city visits
upon my fellow-men. You may be familiar with the
history of that glorious and immortal ruler, the Caliph
Harun Al Rashid, whose wise and beneficent excursions
among his people in the city of Bagdad secured him the
privilege of relieving so much of their distress. In my
humble way I walk in his footsteps. I seek for romance
and adventure in city streets — not in ruined castles or
in crumbling palaces. To me the greatest marvels of
magic are those that take place in men's hearts when
acted upon by the furious and diverse forces of a crowded
population. In your strange behavior this evening I
fancy a story lurks. I read in your act something deeper
than the wanton wastefulness of a spendthrift. I observe
in your countenance the certain traces of consuming
grief or despair. I repeat — I invite your confidence. I

188 Strictly Business

am not without some power to alleviate and advise. Will
you not trust me?"

"Gee, how you talk!" exclaimed the young man, a
gleam of admiration supplanting for a moment the dull
sadness of his eyes. "You've got the Astor Library
skinned to a synopsis of preceding chapters. I mind
that old Turk you speak of. I read *The Arabian
Nights' when I was a kid. He was a kind of Bill
Devery and Charlie Schwab rolled into one. But,
say, you might wave enchanted dishrags and make
copper bottles smoke up coon giants all night without
ever touching me. My case won't yield to that kind of
treatment."

"If I could hear your story," said the Margrave, with
his lofty, serious smile.

"I'll spiel it in about nine words," said the young
man, with a deep sigh, "but I don't think you can help
me any. Unless you're a peach at guessing it's back to
the Bosphorus for you on your magic linoleum."

the story of the young man and the harness
maker's riddle

"I work in Hildebrant's saddle and harness shop
down in Grand Street. I've worked there five years.
I get $18 a week. That's enough to marry on, ain't it ?
Well, I'm not going to get married. Old Hildebrant is
one of these funny Dutchmen — you know the kind —

A Bird of Bagdad 189

always getting off bum jokes. He's got about a million
riddles and things that he faked from Rogers Brothers*
great-grandfather. Bill Watson works there, too. Me
and Bill have to stand for them chestnuts day after day.
WTiy do we do it ? Well, jobs ain't to be picked off every
Anheuser bush — And then there's Laura.

"What.? The old man's daughter. Comes in the
shop every day. About nineteen, and the picture of the
blonde that sits on the palisades of the Rhine and charms
the clam-diggers into the surf. Hair the color of straw
matting, and eyes as black and shiny as the best harness
blacking — think of that !

"Me? Well, it's either me or Bill Watson. She treats
us both equal. Bill is all to the psychopathic about her;
and me ? — well, you saw me plating the road-bed of the
Great Maroon Way with silver to-night. That was on
account of Laura. I was spiflicated, Your Highness, and
I wot not of what I wouldst.

"How? Why, old Hildebrant says to me and Bill this
afternoon: *Boys, one riddle have I for you gehabt
haben. A young man who cannot riddles antworten,
he is not so good by business for ein family to provide —
is not that — hein ?' And he hands us a riddle — a
conundrum, some calls it — and he chuckles interiorly
and gives both of us till to-morrow morning to work out
the answer to it. And he says whichever of us guesses
the repartee end of it goes to his house o' Wednesday night

190 Strictly Business

to his daughter's birthday party. And it means Laura
for whichever of us goes, for she's naturally aching for a
husband, and it's either me or Bill Watson, for old Hilde-
brant likes us both, and wants her to marry somebody
that'll carry on the business after he's stitched his last pair
of traces.

"The riddle? Why, it was this: *What kind of a
hen lays the longest?' Think of that! What kind of a
hen lays the longest? Ain't it like a Dutchman to risk
a man's happiness on a fool proposition like that ? Now,
what's the use? What I don't know about hens would
fill several incubators. You say you're giving imitations
of the old Arab guy that gave away — libraries in Bagdad.
Well, now, can you whistle up a fairy that'll solve this hen
query, or not ? "

When the young man ceased the Margrave arose and
paced to and fro by the park bench for several minutes.
Finally he sat again, and said, in grave and impressive
tones :

"I must confess, sir, that during the eight years
that I have spent in search of adventure and in
relieving distress I have never encountered a more
interesting or a more perplexing case. I fear that I
have overlooked hens in my researches and observations.
As to their habits, their times and manner of laying,
their many varieties and cross-breedings, their span of
life, their "

A Bird of Bagdad 191

''Oh, don't make an Ibsen drama of it!" interrupted
the young man, flippantly. " Riddles — especially old
Hildebrant's riddles — don't have to be worked out
seriously. They are light themes such as Sim Ford and
Harry Thurston Peck like to handle. But, somehow, I
can't strike just the answer. Bill Watson may, and he
may not. To-morrow will tell. \Yell, Your Majesty,
I'm glad anyhow that you butted in and whiled the time
away. I guess Mr. Al Rashid himself would have
bounced back if one of his constituents had conducted him
up against this riddle. I'll say good night. Peace fo*
yours, and what-you-may-call-its of Allah."

The Margrave, with a gloomy air, held out his hand.

"I cannot express my regret," he said, sadly. "Never
before have I found myself unable to assist in some way.
* What kind of a hen lays the longest ? ' It is a baffling
problem. There is a hen, I believe, called the Plymouth
Rock that "

"Cut it out," said the young man. "The Caliph trade
is a mighty serious one. I don't suppose you'd even see
anything funny in a preacher's defense of John D. Rocke-
feller. W^ell, good night, Your Nibs."

From habit the Margrave began to fumble in his
pockets. He drew forth a card and handed it to the
young man.

"Do me the favor to accept this, anyhow," he said.
"The time may come when it might be of use to you."

192 Strictly Business

" Thanks ! " said the young man, pocketing it carelessly.
"My name is Simmons."

:): Hs 4( 4s H( )i(

Shame to him who would hint that the reader's interest
shall altogether pursue the Margrave August Michael
von Paulsen Quigg. I am indeed astray if my hand fail
in keeping the way where my peruser's heart would
follow. Then let us, on the morrow, peep quickly in at
the door of Hildebrant, harness maker.

Hildebrant's 200 pounds reposed on a bench, silver-
buckling a raw leather martingale.

Bill Watson came in first.

"Veil," said Hildebrant, shaking all over with the vile
conceit of the joke-maker, " haf you guessed him ? * Vat
kind of a hen lays der longest.^' "

" Er — why, I think so," said Bill, rubbing a servile
chin. " I think so, Mr. Hildebrant — the one that lives
the longest Is that right ? "

"Nein!" said Hildebrant, shaking his head violently.
"You haf not guessed der answer."

Bill passed on and donned a bed-tick apron and
bachelorhood.

In came the young man of the Arabian Night's fiasco
— pale, melancholy, hopeless.

"Veil," said Hildebrant, "haf you guessed him? * Vat
kind of a hen lays der longest ?' "

A Bird of Bagdad 193

Simmons regarded him with dull savagery in his eye.
Should he curse this mountain of pernicious humor —
curse him and die ? Why should — But there was Laura.

Dogged, speechless, he thrust his hands into his coat
pockets and stood. His hand encountered the strange
touch of the Margrave's card. He drew it out and
looked at it, as men about to be hanged look at a crawling
fly. There was written on it in Quigg's bold, round hand :
" Good for one roast chicken to bearer."

Simmons looked up with a flashing eye.

"A dead one!" said he.

" Goot ! " roared Hildebrant, rocking the table with
giant glee. "Dot is right! You gome at mine house at
8 o'clock to der party."

XVI

COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON

1 HERE are no more Christmas stories to write. Fiction
is exhausted; and newspaper items, the next best, are
manufactured by clever young journaUsts who have
married early and have an engagingly pessimistic view of
life. Therefore, for seasonable diversion, we are reduced
to two very questionable sources — facts and philosophy.
We will begin with — whichever you choose to call it.

Children are pestilential little animals with which we
have to cope under a bewildering variety of conditions.
Especially when childish sorrows overwhelm them are we
put to our wits' end. We exhaust our paltry store of
consolation; and then beat them, sobbing, to sleep. Then
we grovel in the dust of a million years, and ask God why.
Thus we call out of the rat-trap. As for the children, no
one understands them except old maids, hunchbacks,
and shepherd dogs.

Now come the facts in the case of the Rag-Doll, the
Tatterdemalion, and the Twenty-fifth of December.

On the tenth of that month the Child of the Millionaire
lost her rag-doll. There were many servants in the Mil-

194

Compliments of the Season 195

lionaire's palace on the Hudson, and these ransacked the
house and grounds, but without finding the lost treasure.
The child was a girl of five, and one of those perverse
little beasts that often wound the sensibilities of wealthy
parents by fixing their affections upon some \ailgar, inex-
pensive toy instead of upon diamond-studded automobiles
and pony phaetons.

The Child grieved sorely and truly, a thing inexplicable
to the Millionaire, to whom the rag-doll market was about
as interesting as Bay State Gas; and to the Lady, the
Child's mother, who was all for form — that is, nearly all,
as you shall see.

The Child cried inconsolably, and grew hollow-eyed,
knock-kneed, spindling, and cor}^kilverty in many other
respects. The Millionaire smiled and tapped his coffers
confidently. The pick of the output of the French and
German toymakers was rushed by special delivery to the
mansion; but Rachel refused to be comforted. She was
weeping for her rag child, and was for a high protective
tariff against all foreign foolishness. Then doctors with
the finest bedside manners and stop-watches were called
in. One by one they chattered futilely about pepto-
manganate of iron and sea voyages and hypophosphites
until their stop-watches showed that Bill Rendered was
under the wire for show or place. Then, as men, they
advised that the rag-doll be found as soon as possible and
restored to its mourning parent. The Child sniffed at

196 Strictly Business

therapeutics, chewed a thumb, and wailed for her Betsy.
And all this time cablegrams were coming from Santa
Claus saying that he would soon be here and enjoining
us to show a true Christian spirit and let up on the pool-
rooms and tontine policies and platoon systems long
enough to give him a welcome. Everywhere the spirit
of Christmas was diffusing itself. The banks were refus-
ing loans, the pawn-brokers had doubled their gang of
helpers, people bumped your shins on the streets with
red sleds, Thomas and Jeremiah bubbled before you on
the bars while you waited on one foot, holly-wreaths of
hospitality were hung in windows of the stores, they who
had 'em were getting out their furs. You hardly knew
which was the best bet in balls — three, high, moth, or
snow. It was no time at which to lose the rag-doll of
your heart.

If Doctor Watson's investigating friend had been called
in to solve this mysterious disappearance he might have
observed on the Millionaire's wall a copy of *'The Vam-
pire." That would have quickly suggested, by induction,
"A rag and a bone and a hank of hair." " Flip," a Scotch
terrier, next to the rag-doll in the Child's heart, frisked
through the halls. The hank of hair! Aha! X, the
unfound quantity, represented the rag-doll. But, the

bone ? Well, when dogs find bones they Done !

It were an easy and a fruitful task to examine Flip's fore-
feet. Look, Watson ! Earth — dried earth between the

Compliments of the Season 197

toes. Of course, the dog — but Sherlock was not there.
Therefore it devolves. But topography and architecture
must intervene.

The Millionaire's palace occupied a lordly space. In
front of it was a lawn close-mowed as a South Ireland
man's face two days after a shave. At one side of it,
and fronting on another street was a pleasaunce trimmed
to a leaf, and the garage and stables. The Scotch pup
had ravished the rag-doll from the nursery, dragged it to
a corner of the lawn, dug a hole, and buried it after the
manner of careless undertakers. There you have the
mystery solved, and no checks to ^Tite for the hypoder-
mical wizard or fi'-pun notes to toss to the sergeant. Then
let's get down to the heart of the thing, tiresome readers —
the Christmas heart of the thing.

Fuzzy was drunk — not riotously or helplessly or
loquaciously, as you or I might get, but decently, appro-
priately, and inoffensively, as becomes a gentleman down
on his luck.

Fuzzy was a soldier of misfortune. The road, the
haystack, the park bench, the kitchen door, the bitter
round of eleemosynary beds-with-shower-bath-attach-
ment, the petty pickings and ignobly garnered largesse of
great cities — these formed the chapters of his history.

Fuzzy walked toward the river, down the street that
bounded one side of the Millionaire's house and grounds.
He saw a leg of Betsy, the lost rag-doll, protruding, like

198 Strictly Business

the clue to a Lilliputian murder mystery, from its untimely
grave in a corner of the fence. He dragged forth the
maltreated infant, tucked it under his arm, and went on
his way crooning a road song of his brethren that no doll
that has been brought up to the sheltered life should hear.
Well for Betsy that she had no ears. And well that she
had no eyes save unseeing circles of black; for the faces of
Fuzzy and the Scotch terrier were those of brothers, and
the heart of no rag-doll could withstand twice to become
the prey of such fearsome monsters.

Though you may not know it, Grogan's saloon stands
near the river and near the foot of the street down which
Fuzzy traveled. In Grogan's, Christmas cheer was
already rampant.

Fuzzy entered with his doll. He fancied that as a
mummer at the feast of Saturn he might earn a few drops
from the wassail cup.

He set Betsy on the bar and addressed her loudly and
humorously, seasoning his speech with exaggerated com-
pliments and endearments, as one entertaining his lady
friend. The loafers and bibbers around caught the farce
of it, and roared. The bartender gave Fuzzy a drink.
Oh, many of us carry rag-dolls.

"One for the lady?" suggested Fuzzy impudently,
and tucked another contribution to Art beneath his
waistcoat.

He began to see possibilities in Betsy. His first-night

Compliments of the Season 199

had been a success. Visions of a vaudeville circuit about
town dawned upon him.

In a group near the stove sat "Pigeon" McCarthy,
Black Riley, and " One-ear " Mike, well and unfavorably
known in the tough shoestring district that blackened the
left bank of the river. They passed a newspaper back
and forth among themselves. The item that each solid
and blunt forefinger pointed out was an advertisement
headed "One Hundred Dollars Reward." To earn it
one must return the rag-doll lost, strayed, or stolen from
the Millionaire's mansion. It seemed that grief still
ravaged, unchecked, in the bosom of the too faithful Child.
Flip, the terrier, capered and shook his absurd whisker
before her, powerless to distract. She wailed for her
Betsy in the faces of walking, talking, mama-ing, and
eye-closing French Mabelles and Violettes. The adver-
tisement was a last resort.

Black Riley came from behind the stove and approached
Fuzzy in his one-sided parabolic way.

The Christmas mummer, flushed with success, had
tucked Betsy under his arm, and was about to depart to
the filling of impromptu dates elsewhere.

"Say, 'Bo," said Black Riley to him, "where did you
cop out dat doll ? "

" This doll ? " asked Fuzzy, touching Betsy with his
forefinger to be sure that she was the one referred to.
" Why, this doll was presented to me by the Emperor of

200 Strictly Business

Beloochistan. I have seven hundred others in my countr}'
home in Newport. This doll "

"Cheese the funny business," said Riley. **You
swiped it or picked it up at de house on de hill where —
but never mind dat. You want to take fifty cents for de
rags, and take it quick. Me brother's kid at home might
be wantin' to play wid it. Hey — what ? "

He produced the coin.

Fuzzy laughed a gurgling, insolent, alcoholic laugh in
his face. Go to the office of Sarah Bernhardt's manager
and propose to him that she be released from a night's
performance to entertain the Tackytown Lyceum and
Literary Coterie. You will hear the duplicate of Fuzzy 's
laugh.

Black Riley gauged Fuzzy quickly with his blueberry
eye as a wrestler does. His hand was itching to play the
Roman and wrest the rag Sabine from the extemporaneous
merry-andrew who was entertaining an angel unaware.
But he refrained. Fuzzy was fat and solid and big. Three
inches of well-nourished corporeity, defended from the
winter winds by dingy linen, intervened between his vest
and trousers. Countless small, circular wrinkles running
around his coat-sleeves and knees guaranteed the quality
of his bone and muscle. His small, blue eyes, bathed
in the moisture of altruism and wooziness, looked upon
you kindly, yet without abashment. He was whiskerly,
whiskyly, fleshily formidable. So, Black Riley temporized.

Compliments of the Season 201

"Wot'll you take for it, den?" he asked.

"Money," said Fuzzy, with husky firmness, "cannot
buy her."

He was intoxicated with the artist's first sweet cup of
attainment. To set a faded-blue, earth-stained rag-doll
on a bar, to hold mimic converse with it, and to find his
heart leaping with the sense of plaudits earned and his
throat scorching with free libations poured in his honor
— could base coin buy him from such achievements ?
You will perceive that Fuzzy had the temperament.

Fuzzy walked out with the gait of a trained sea-lion in
search of other cafes to conquer.

Though the dusk of twilight was hardly yet apparent,
lights were beginning to spangle the city like pop-corn
bursting in a deep skillet. Christmas Eve, impatiently
expected, was peeping over the brink of the hour.
Millions had prepared for its celebration. Towns would
be painted red. You, yourself, have heard the horns and
dodged the capers of the Saturnalians.

"Pigeon" McCarthy, Black Riley, and "One-ear"
Mike held a hasty converse outside Grogan's. They
were narrow-chested, pallid striplings, not fighters in the
open, but more dangerous in their ways of warfare than
the most terrible of Turks. Fuzzy, in a pitched battle,
could have eaten the three of them. In a go-as-you-please
encounter he was already doomed.

They overtook him just as he and Betsy were entering

202 Strictly Business

Costigan's Casino. They deflected him, and shoved
the newspaper under his nose. Fuzzy could read — and
more.

"Boys," said he, "you are certainly damn true friends.
Give me a v^^eek to think it over."

The soul of a real artist is quenched with difficulty.

The boys carefully pointed out to him that advertise-
ments were soulless, and that the deficiencies of the day
might not be supplied by the morrow.

"A cool hundred," said Fuzzy thoughtfully and mushily.

"Boys," said he, **you are true friends. I'll go up and
claim the reward. The show business is not what it used
to be."

Night was falling more surely. The three tagged
at his sides to the foot of the rise on which stood
the Millionaire's house. There Fuzzy turned upon
them acrimoniously.

"You are a pack of putty-faced beagle-hounds," he
roared. " Go away."

They went away — a little way.

In " Pigeon " McCarthy's pocket was a section of one-
inch gas-pipe eight inches long. In one end of it and in
the middle of it was a lead plug. One-half of it
was packed tight with solder. Black Riley carried a
slung-shot, being a conventional thug. " One-ear " Mike
relied upon a pair of brass knucks — an heirloom in
the family.

Compliments of the Season 203

"Why fetch and carry," said Black Riley, "when some
one will do it for ye ? Let him bring it out to us. Hey
— what?"

"We can chuck him in the river," said "Pigeon"
McCarthy, "with a stone tied to his feet."

"Youse guys make me tired," said "One-ear" Mike
sadly. " Ain't progress ever appealed to none of yez ?
Sprinkle a little gasoline on 'im, and drop 'im on the
Drive — well ? "

Fuzzy entered the Millionaire's gate and zigzagged
toward the softly glowing entrance of the mansion. The
three goblins came up to the gate and lingered — one on
each side of it, one beyond the roadway. They fingered
their cold metal and leather, confident.

Fuzzy rang the door-bell, smiling foolishly and dreamily.
An atavistic instinct prompted him to reach for the button
of his right glove. But he wore no gloves ; so his left hand
dropped, embarrassed.

The particular menial whose duty it was to open doors
to silks and laces shied at first sight of Fuzzy. But a
second glance took in his passport, his card of admission,
his surety of welcome — the lost rag-doll of the daughter
of the house dangling under his arm.

Fuzzy was admitted into a great hall, dim with the glow
from unseen lights. The hireling went away and returned
with a maid and the Child. The doll was restored to the
mourning one. She clasped her lost darling to her breast;

204 Strictly Business

and then, with the inordinate selfishness and candor of
childhood, stamped her foot and whined hatred and fear
of the odious being who had rescued her from the depths
of sorrow and despair. Fuzzy wriggled himself into an
ingratiatory attitude and essayed the idiotic smile and
blattering small talk that is supposed to charm the bud-
ding intellect of the young. The Child bawled, and was
dragged away, hugging her Betsy close.

There came the Secretary, pale, poised, polished, gliding
in pumps, and worshipping pomp and ceremony. He
counted out into Fuzzy 's hand ten ten-dollar bills; then
dropped his eye upon the door, transferred it to James,
its custodian, indicated the obnoxious earner of the reward
with the other, and allowed his pumps to waft him away
to secretarial regions.

James gathered Fuzzy with his own commanding optic
and swept him as far as the front door.

When the money touched Fuzzy's dingy palm his first
instinct was to take to his heels; but a second thought
restrained him from that blunder of etiquette. It was his ;
it had been given him. It — and, oh, what an elysium
it opened to the gaze of his mind's eye! He had tumbled
to the foot of the ladder; he was hungry, homeless, friend-
less, ragged, cold, drifting; and he held in his hand the
key to a paradise of the mud-honey that he craved. The
fairy doll had waved a wand with her rag-stuffed hand;
and now wherever he might go the enchanted palaces with

Compliments of the Season 205

shining foot-rests and magic red fluids in gleaming glass-
ware would be open to him.

He followed James to the door.

He paused there as the flunky drew open the great
mahogany portal for him to pass into the vestibule.

Beyond the wrought-iron gates in the dark highway
Black Riley and his two pals casually strolled, fingering
under their coats the inevitably fatal weapons that were
to make the reward of the rag-doll theirs.

Fuzzy stopped at the Millionaire's door and bethought
himself. Like little sprigs of mistletoe on a dead tree,
certain living green thoughts and memories began to deco-
rate his confused mind. He was quite drunk, mind you,
and the present was beginning to fade. Those wreaths
and festoons of holly with their scarlet berries making
the great hall gay — where had he seen such things before ?
Somewhere he had known polished floors and odors of
fresh flowers in winter, and — and some one was singing
a song in the house that he thought he had heard before.
Some one singing and playing a harp. Of course, it was
Christmas — Fuzzy thought he must have been pretty
drunk to have overlooked that.

And then he went out of the present, and there came
back to him out of some impossible, vanished, and irrev-
ocable past a little, pure- white, transient, forgotten ghost
— the spirit of noblesse oblige. Upon a gentleman certain
things devolve.

206 Strictly Business

James opened the outer door. A stream of light went
down the graveled walk to the iron gate. Black Riley,
McCarthy, and " One-ear " Mike saw, and carelessly drew
their sinister cordon closer about the gate.

With a more imperious gesture than James's master
had ever used or could ever use, Fuzzy compelled the
menial to close the door. Upon a gentleman certain
things devolve. Especially at the Christmas season.

"It is cust — custormary," he said to James, the flus-
tered, " when a gentleman calls on Christmas Eve to pass
the compliments of the season with the lady of the house.
You und 'stand ? I shall not move shtep till I pass com-
pl'ments season with lady the house. Und'stand .^"

There was an argument. James lost. Fuzzy raised his
voice and sent it through the house unpleasantly. I did
not say he was a gentleman. He was simply a tramp
being visited by a ghost.

A sterling silver bell rang. James went back to answer
it, leaving Fuzzy in the hall. James explained somewhere
to some one.

Then he came and conducted Fuzzy into the library.

The lady entered a moment later. She was more beau-
tiful and holy than any picture that Fuzzy had seen. She
smiled, and said something about a doll. Fuzzy didn't
understand that ; he remembered nothing about a doll.

A footman brought in two small glasses of sparkling

Compliments of the Season 207

wine on a stamped sterling-silver waiter. The Lady took
one. The other was handed to Fuzzy.

As his fingers closed on the slender glass stem his dis-
abilities dropped from him for one brief moment. He
straightened himself; and Time, so disobliging to most of
us, turned backward to accommodate Fuzzy.

Forgotten Christmas ghosts whiter than the false beards
of the most opulent Kriss Kringle were rising in the fumes
of Grogan's whisky. What had the Millionaire's mansion
to do w^ith a long, wainscoted Virginia hall, where the
riders were grouped around a silver punch-bowl, drinking
the ancient toast of the House ? And w^hy should the
patter of the cab horses' hoofs on the frozen street be in
any wise related to the sound of the saddled hunters stamp-
ing under the shelter of the west veranda? And what
had Fuzzy to do with any of it ?

The Lady, looking at him over her glass, let her conde-
scending smile fade away like a false dawn. Her eyes
turned serious. She saw something beneath the rags and
Scotch terrier whiskers that she did not understand. But
it did not matter.

Fuzzy lifted his glass and smiled vacantly.

"P-pardon, lady," he said, "but couldn't leave without
exchangin' comp'ments sheason with lady th' house.
'Gainst princ'ples gen'leman do sho."

And then he began the ancient salutation that was a
tradition in the House when men wore lace ruffles and
powder.

208 Strictly Business

" The blessings of another year "

Fuzzy's memory failed him. The Lady prompted :

'* Be upon this hearth."

" The guest '* stammered Fuzzy.

" And upon her who " continued the Lady,

with a leading smile.

"Oh, cut it out," said Fuzzy, ill-mannered ly. "I can't
remember. Drink hearty."

Fuzzy had shot his arrow. They drank. The Lady
smiled again the smile of her caste. James enveloped
Fuzzy and re-conducted him toward the front door. The
harp music still softly drifted through the house.

Outside, Black Riley breathed on his cold hands and
hugged the gate.

"I wonder," said the Lady to herself, musing, "who
— but there were so many who came. I wonder whether
memory is a curse or a blessing to them after they have
fallen so low."

Fuzzy and his escort were nearly at the door. The
Lady called : " James ! "

James stalked back obsequiously, leaving Fuzzy wait-
ing unsteadily, with his brief spark of the divine fire gone.

Outside, Black Riley stamped his cold feet and got a
firmer grip on his section of gas-pipe.

"You will conduct this gentleman," said the Lady,
"downstairs. Then tell Louis to get out the Mercedes
and take him to whatever place he wishes to go."

xvn

A NIGHT IN NEW ARABIA

1 HE great city of Bagdad-on-the-Subway is caliph-ridden.
Its palaces, bazaars, khans, and byways are thronged with
Al Rashids in divers disguises, seeking diversion and
victims for their unbridled generosity. You can scarcely
find a poor beggar whom they are willing to let enjoy his
spoils unsuccored, nor a wrecked unfortunate upon whom
they will not reshower the means of fresh misfortune. You
will hardly find anywhere a hungry one who has not had
the opportunity to tighten his belt in gift libraries, nor a
poor pundit who has not blushed at the holiday basket
of celery-crowned turkey forced resoundingly through his
door by the eleemosynary press.

So then, fearfully through the Harun-haunted streets
creep the one-eyed calenders, the Little Hunchback and
the Barber's Sixth Brother, hoping to escape the minis-
trations of the roving horde of caliphoid sultans.

Entertainment for many Arabian nights might be had
from the histories of those who have escaped the largesse
of the army of Commanders of the Faithful. Until dawn
you might sit on the enchanted rug and listen to such

209

210 Strictly Business

stories as are told of the powerful genie Roc-Ef-El-Er who
sent the Forty Thieves to soak up the oil plant of Ali
Baba; of the good Caliph Kar-Neg-Ghe, who gave away
palaces; of the Seven Voyages of Sailbad, the Sinner, who
frequented wooden excursion steamers among the islands;
of the Fisherman and the Bottle; of the Barmecides' Board-
ing house; of Aladdin's rise to wealth by means of his
Wonderful Gas-meter.

But now, there being ten sultans to one Sheherazade, she
is held too valuable to be in fear of the bowstring. In con-
sequence the art of narrative languishes. And, as the lesser
caliphs are hunting the happy poor and the resigned unfortu-
nate from cover to cover in order to heap upon them strange
mercies and mysterious benefits, too often comes the report
from Arabian head quarters that the captive refused * 'to talk. "

This reticence, then, in the actors who perform the sad
comedies of their philanthropy-scourged world, must, in
a degree, account for the shortcomings of this painfully
gleaned tale, which shall be called

THE STORY OF THE CALIPH WHO ALLEVIATED HIS CON-
SCIENCE

Old Jacob Spraggins mixed for himself some Scotch
and lithia water at his $1,200 oak sideboard. Inspiration
must have resulted from its imbibition, for immediately
afterward he struck the quartered oak soundly with his
fist and shouted to the empty dining room :

A Night in New Arabia 211

"By the coke ovens of hell, it must be that ten thousand
dollars! If I can get that squared, it'll do the trick."

Thus, by the commonest artifice of the trade, having
gained your interest, the action of the story will now be
suspended, leaving you grumpily to consider a sort of dull
biography beginning fifteen years before.

When old Jacob was young Jacob he was a breaker boy
in a Pennsylvania coal mine. I don't know what a
breaker boy is; but his occupation seems to be standing
by a coal dump with a wan look and a dinner-pail to have
his picture taken for magazine articles. Anyhow, Jacob
was one. But, instead of dying of overwork at nine, and
leaving his helpless parents and brothers at the mercy of
the union strikers' reserve fund, he hitched up his galluses,
put a dollar or two in a side proposition now and then, and
at forty-five was worth $20,000,000.

There now! it's over. Hardly had time to yawn, did
you ? I've seen biographies that — but let us dissemble.

I want you to consider Jacob Spraggins, Esq., after he
had arrived at the seventh stage of his career. The stages
meant are, first, humble origin; second, deserved promo-
tion; third, stockholder; fourth, capitalist; fifth, trust
magnate; sixth, rich malefactor; seventh, caliph; eighth, x.
The eighth stage shall be left to the higher mathematics.

At fifty-five Jacob retired from active business. The
income of a czar was still rolling in on him from coal, iron,
real estate, oil, railroads, manufactories, and corporations,

212 Strictly Business

but none of it touched Jacob's hands in a raw state. It
was a sterilized increment, carefully cleaned and dusted
and fumigated until it arrived at its ultimate stage of
untainted, spotless checks in the white fingers of his pri-
vate secretary. Jacob built a three-million-dollar palace
on a corner lot fronting on Nabob Avenue, city of New
Bagdad, and began to feel the mantle of the late H. A.
Rashid descending upon him. Eventually Jacob slipped
the mantle under his collar, tied it in a neat four-in-hand,
and became a licensed harrier of our Mesopotamian
proletariat.

When a man's income becomes so large that the butcher
actually sends him the kind of steak he orders, he begins
to think about his soul's salvation. Now, the various
stages or classes of rich men must not be forgotten.
The capitalist can tell you to a dollar the amount of his
wealth. The trust magnate "estimates" it. The rich
malefactor hands you a cigar and denies that he has
bought the P. D. & Q. The caliph merely smiles and
talks about Hammerstein and the musical lasses. There
is a record of tremendous altercation at breakfast in a
"Where-to-Dine-Well" tavern between a magnate and
his wife, the rift within the loot being that the wife calcu-
lated their fortune at a figure $3,000,000 higher than did
her future divorce. Oh, well, I, myself, heard a similar
quarrel between a man and his wife because he found fifty
cents less in his pockets than he thought he had. After

A Night in New Arabia 213

all, we are all human — Count Tolstoi, R. Fitzsimmons,
Peter Pan, and the rest of us.

Don't lose heart because the story seems to be degen-
erating into a sort of moral essay for intellectual readers.

There will be dialogue and stage business pretty soon.

When Jacob first began to compare the eyes of needles
with the camels in the Zoo he decided upon organized
charity. He had his secretary send a check for one mil-
lion to the Universal Benevolent Association of the Globe.
You may have looked down through a grating in front
of a decayed warehouse for a nickel that you had dropped
through. But that is neither here nor there. The Asso-
ciation acknowledged receipt of his favor of the 24th ult.
with enclosure as stated. Separated by a double line, but
still mighty close to the matter under the caption of " Oddi-
ties of the Day's News" in an evening paper, Jacob Sprag-
gins read that one "Jasper Spargyous" had "donated
$100,000 to the U. B. A. of G." A camel may have a
stomach for each day in the week; but I dare not venture
to accord him whiskers, for fear of the Great Displeasure
at Washington; but if he have whiskers, surely not one of
them will seem to have been inserted in the eye of a needle
by that effort of that rich man to enter the K. of H. The
right is reserved to reject any and all bids; signed, S. Peter,
secretary and gatekeeper.

Next, Jacob selected the best endowed college he could
scare up and presented it with a $200,000 laboratory. The

214 Strictly Business

college did not maintain a scientific course, but it accepted
the money and built an elaborate lavatory instead, which
was no diversion of funds so far as Jacob ever discovered.

The faculty met and invited Jacob to come over and
take his ABC degree. Before sending the invitation
they smiled, cut out the C, added the proper punctuation
marks, and all was well.

While walking on the campus before being capped and
gowned, Jacob saw two professors strolling nearby. Their
voices, long adapted to indoor acoustics, undesignedly
reached his ear.

"There goes the latest chevalier d' Industrie,'' said one
of them, "to buy a sleeping powder from us. He gets
his degree to-morrow."

*'In foro conscienticB,'' said the other. "Let's 'eave
'arf a brick at 'im."

Jacob ignored the Latin, but the brick pleasantry was
not too hard for him. There was no mandragora in the
honorary draught of learning that he had bought. That
was before the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act.

Jacob wearied of philanthropy on a large scale.

"If I could see folks made happier, he said to himself —
"if I could see 'em myself and hear 'em express their grati-
tude for what I done for 'em it would make me feel better.
This donatin' funds to institutions and societies is about
as satisfactory as dropping money into a broken slot
machine."

A Night in New Arabia 215

So Jacob followed his nose, which led him through
unswept streets to the homes of the poorest.

"The very thing!" said Jacob. "I will charter two
river steamboats, pack them full of these unfortunate chil-
dren and — say ten thousand dolls and drums and a thou-
sand freezers of ice cream, and give them a delightful out-
ing up the Sound. The sea breezes on that trip ought to
blow the taint off some of this money that keeps coming
in faster than I can work it off my mind."

Jacob must have leaked some of his benevolent inten-
tions, for an immense person with a bald face and a mouth
that looked as if it ought to have a **Drop Letters Here"
sign over it hooked a finger around him and set him in a
space between a barber's pole and a stack of ash cans.
Words came out of the post-office slit — smooth, husky
words with gloves on 'em, but sounding as if they might
turn to bare knuckles any moment.

"Say, Sport, do you know where you are at ? Well, dis
is Mike O'Grady's district you're buttin' into — see ?
Mike's got de stomach-ache privilege for every kid in dis
neighborhood — see ? And if dere's any picnics or red
balloons to be dealt out here, Mike's money pays for 'em
— see ? Don't you butt in, or something'll be handed

to you. Youse d settlers and reformers with your

social ologies and your millionaire detectives have got
dis district in a hell of a fix, anyhow. With your college
students and professors rough-housing de soda-water

216 Strictly Business

stands and dem rubber-neck coaches fillin' de streets, de
folks down here are 'fraid to go out of de houses. Now,
you leave 'em to Mike. Dey belongs to him, and he knows
how to handle 'em. Keep on your own side of de town.
Are you some wiser now, uncle, or do you want to scrap
wit' Mike O'Grady for de Santa Glaus belt in dis district ? "
Clearly, that spot in the moral vineyard was preempted.
So Caliph Spraggins menaced no more the people in the
bazaars of the East Side. To keep down his growing
surplus he doubled his donations to organized charity,
presented the Y. M. C. A. of his native town with a $10,000
collection of butterflies, and sent a check to the famine
sufferers in China big enough to buy new emerald eyes and
diamond-filled teeth for all their gods. But none of these
charitable acts seemed to bring peace to the caliph's heart.
He tried to get a personal note into his benefactions by
tipping bell-boys and waiters $10 and $20 bills. He got
well snickered at and derided for that by the minions who
accept with respect gratuities commensurate to the service
performed. He sought out an ambitious and talented
but poor young woman, and bought for her the star part
in a new comedy. He might have gotten rid of $50,000
more of his cumbersome money in this philanthropy if he
had not neglected to write letters to her. But she lost
the suit for lack of evidence, while his capital still kept
piling up, and his optikos needleorum camelihus — or rich
man's disease — was unrelieved.

I

A Night in New Arabia 217

In Caliph Spraggins's $3,000,000 home lived his sister
Henrietta, who used to cook for the coal miners in a
twenty-five-cent eating house in Coketown, Pa., and who
now would have offered John Mitchell only two fingers
of her hand to shake. And his daughter Celia, nineteen,
back from boarding-school and from being polished off
by private instructors in the restaurant languages and those
etudes and things.

Celia is the heroine. Lest the artist's delineation of her
charms on this very page humbug your fancy, take from
me her authorized description. She was a nice-looking,
awkward, loud, rather bashful, brown-haired girl, with a
sallow complexion, bright eyes, and a perpetual smile.
She had a wholesome, Spraggins-inherited love for plain
food, loose clothing, and the society of the lower classes.
She had too much health and youth to feel the burden of
wealth. She had a wide mouth that kept the peppermint-
pepsin tablets rattling like hail from the slot-machine
wherever she went, and she could whistle hornpipes.
Keep this picture in mind; and let the artist do his worst.

Celia looked out of her window one day and gave her
heart to the grocer's young man. The receiver thereof
was at that moment engaged in conceding immortality
to his horse and calling down upon him the ultimate fate of
the wicked; so he did not notice the transfer. A horse
should stand still when you are lifting a crate of strictly
new-laid eggs out of the wagon.

218 Strictly Business

Young lady reader, you would have liked that grocer's
young man yourself. But you wouldn't have given him
your heart, because you are saving it for a riding-master,
or a shoe-manufacturer with a torpid liver, or something
quiet but rich in gray tweeds at Palm Beach. Oh, I
know about it. So I am glad the grocer's young man was
for Celia, and not for you.

The grocer's young man was slim and straight and as
confident and easy in his movements as the man in the
back of the magazines who wears the new frictionless
roller suspenders. He wore a gray bicycle cap on the back
of his head, and his hair was straw-colored and curly, and
his sunburned face looked like one that smiled a good deal
when he was not preaching the doctrine of everlasting
punishment to deli very- wagon horses. He slung imported
Al fancy groceries about as though they were only the
stuff he delivered at boarding-houses ; and when he picked
up his whip, your mind instantly recalled Mr. Tackett and
his air with the buttonless foils.

Tradesmen delivered their goods at a side gate at the
rear of the house. The grocer's wagon came about ten
in the morning. For three days Celia watched the driver
when he came, finding something new each time to admire
in the lofty and almost contemptuous way he had of tossing
around the choicest gifts of Pomona, Ceres, and the can-
ning factories. Then she consulted Annette.

To be explicit, Annette McCorkle, the second house-

I

A Night in New Arabia 219

maid, who deserves a paragraph herself. Annette
Fletcherized large numbers of romantic novels which she
obtained at a free public library branch (donated by one
of the biggest caliphs in the business). She was Celiacs
sidekicker and chum, though Aunt Henrietta didn't know
it, you may hazard a bean or two.

"Oh, canary-bird seed!" exclaimed Annette. "Ain't it
a corkin' situation ? You a heiress, and fallin' in love with
him on sight! He's a sweet boy, too, and above his busi-
ness. But he ain't suspectible like the common run of
grocer's assistants. He never pays no attention to me."

"He will to me," said Celia.

"Riches " began Annette, unsheathing the not

unjustifiable feminine sting.

"Oh, you're not so beautiful," said Celia, with her wide,
disarming smile. "Neither am I; but he sha'n't know
that there's any money mixed up with my looks, such as
they are. That's fair. Now, I want you to lend me one
of your caps and an apron, Annette."

"Oh, marshmallows ! " cried Annette. "I see. Ain't
it lovely? It's just like 'Lurline, the Left-Handed; or,
A Buttonhole Maker's Wrongs.' I'll bet he'll turn out
to be a count."

There was a long hallway (or "passageway," as they
call it in the land of the Colonels) with one side latticed,
running along the rear of the house. The grocer's young
man went through this to deliver his goods. One morning

220 Strictly Business

he passed a girl in there with shining eyes, sallow com-
plexion, and wide, smiling mouth, wearing a maid's cap
and apron. But as he was cumbered with a basket of
Early Drumhead lettuce and Trophy tomatoes and three
bunches of asparagus and six bottles of the most expensive
Queen olives, he saw no more than that she was one of the
maids.

But on his way out he came up behind her, and she was
whistling "Fisher's Hornpipe" so loudly and clearly that
all the piccolos in the world should have disjointed them-
selves and crept into their cases for shame.

The grocer's young man stopped and pushed back his
cap until it hung on his collar button behind.

"That's out o' sight. Kid," said he.

"My name is Celia, if you please," said the whistler,
dazzling him with a three-inch smile.

"That's all right. I'm Thomas McLeod. What part
of the house do you work in ?"

"I'm the — the second parlor maid."

"Do you know the 'Falling Waters' ?"

"No," said Celia, "we don't know anybody. We got
rich too quick — that is, Mr. Spraggins did."

"I'll make you acquainted," said Thomas McLeod.
" It's a strathspey — a first cousin to a hornpipe."

If Celia's whistling put the piccolos out of commission,
Thomas McLeod 's surely made the biggest flutes hunt
their holes. He could actually whistle hass.

A Night in New Arabia 221

T\Tien he stopped Celia was ready to jump into his deliv-
ery wagon and ride with him clear to the end of the pier
and on to the feriy^-boat of the Charon line.

"I'll be around to-morrow at 10:15," said Thomas,
"with some spinach and a case of carbonic."

*' I'll practice that what-you-may-call-it," said Celia. "I
can whistle a fine second."

The processes of courtship are personal, and do not
belong to general literature. They should be chronicled
in detail only in advertisements of iron tonics and in the
secret by-laws of the Woman's Auxiliary of the Ancient
Order of the Rat Trap. But genteel writing may contain
a description of certain stages of its progress without
intruding upon the province of the X-ray or of park
policemen.

A day came when Thomas McLeod and Celia lingered
at the end of the latticed "passage."

"Sixteen a week isn't much," said Thomas, letting his
cap rest on his shoulder blades.

Celia looked through the lattice-work and whistled a
dead march. Shopping with Aunt Henrietta the day
before, she had paid that much for a dozen handkerchiefs.

"Maybe I'll get a raise next month," said Thomas.
"I'll be around to-morrow at the same time with a bag
of flour and the laundry soap."

"All right," said Celia. "Annette's married cousin
pays only $20 a month for a flat in the Bronx."

222 Strictly Business

Never for a moment did she count on the Spraggins
money. She knew Aunt Henrietta's invincible pride of
caste and pa's mightiness as a Colossus of cash, and she
understood that if she chose Thomas she and her grocer's
young man might go whistle for their living.

Another day came, Thomas violating the dignity of
Nabob Avenue with "The Devil's Dream," whistled
keenly between his teeth.

"Raised to eighteen a week yesterday," he said. "Been
pricing flats around Morningside. You want to start
untying those apron strings and unpinning that cap, old
girl."

"Oh, Tommy!" said Celia, with her broadest smile.
"Won't that be enough ? I got Betty to show me how to
make a cottage pudding. I guess we could call it a flat
pudding if we wanted to."

"And tell no lie," said Thomas.

"And I can sweep and polish and dust — of course, a
parlor maid learns that. And we could whistle duets of
evenings."

"The old man said he'd raise me to twenty at Christmas
if Bryan couldn't think of any harder name to call a Repub-
lican than a * postponer, ' " said the grocer's young man.

"I can sew," said Celia; "and I know that you must
make the gas company's man show his badge when he
comes to look at the meter; and I know how to put up
quince jam and window curtains."

A Night in New Arabia 223

"Bully! you're all right, Cele. Yes, I believe we can
pull it off on eighteen."

As he was jumping into the wagon the second parlor
maid braved discover}^ by running swiftly to the gate.

"And, oh, Tommy, I forgot," she called, softly. "I
believe I could make your neckties."

"Forget it," said Thomas decisively.

"And another thing," she continued. "Sliced cucum-
bers at night will drive away cockroaches."

"And sleep, too, you bet," said Mr. McLeod. "Yes,
I believe if I have a deliver}' to make on the West Side this
afternoon I'll look in at a furniture store I know over
there."

It was just as the wagon dashed away that old Jacob
Spraggins struck the sideboard with his fist and made the
mysterious remark about ten thousand dollars that you
perhaps remember. Which justifies the reflection that
some stories, as well as life, and puppies thrown into wells,
move around in circles. Painfully but briefly we must
shed light on Jacob's words.

The foundation of his fortune was made when he was
twenty. A poor coal-digger (ever hear of a rich one ?)
had saved a dollar or two and bought a small tract of land
on a hillside on which he tried to raise corn. Not a nubbin.
Jacob, whose nose was a divining-rod, told him there was
a vein of coal beneath. He bought the land from the
miner for $125 and sold it a month afterward for $10,000.

224 Strictly Business

Luckily the miner had enough left of his sale money to
drink himself into a black coat opening in the back, as
soon as he heard the news.

And so, forty years afterward, we find Jacob illuminated
with the sudden thought that if he could make restitution
of this sum of money to the heirs or assigns of the unlucky
miner, respite and Nepenthe might be his.

And now must come swift action, for we have here some
four thousand words and not a tear shed and never a pistol,
joke, safe, nor bottle cracked.

Old Jacob hired a dozen private detectives to find the
heirs, if any existed, of the old miner, Hugh McLeod.

Get the point ? Of course I know as well as you do that
Thomas is going to be the heir. I might have concealed
the name; but why always hold back your mystery till the
end ? I say, let it come near the middle so people can stop
reading there if they want to.

After the detectives had trailed false clues about three
thousand dollars — I mean miles — they cornered Thomas
at the grocery and got his confession that Hugh McLeod
had been his grandfather, and that there were no other
heirs. They arranged a meeting for him and old Jacob
one morning in one of their offices.

Jacob liked the young man very much. He liked the
way he looked straight at him when he talked, and the way
he threw his bicycle cap over the top of a rose-colored
vase on the centre-table.

A Night in New Arabia 2^5

There was a slight flaw in Jacob's system of restitution.
He did not consider that the act, to be perfect, should
include confession. So he represented himself to be the
agent of the purchaser of the land who had sent him to
refund the sale price for the ease of his conscience.

*'Well, sir," said Thomas, "this sounds to me like an
illustrated post-card from South Boston with * We're hav-
ing a good time here' written on it. I don't know the
game. Is this ten thousand dollars money, or do I have
to save so many coupons to get it ?"

Old Jacob counted out to him twenty five-hundred-
dollar bills.

That was better, he thought, than a check. Thomas
put them thoughtfully into his pocket.

" Grandfather's best thanks," he said, "to the party who
sends it."

Jacob talked on, asking him about his work, how he
spent his leisure time, and what his ambitions were. The
more he saw and heard of Thomas, the better he liked him.
He had not met many young men in Bagdad so frank
and wholesome.

'*I would like to have you visit my house," he said. "I
might help you in investing or laying out your money. I
am a very wealthy man. I have a daughter about grown,
and I would like for you to know her. There are not
many young men I would care to have call on her."

"I'm obliged," said Thomas. "I'm not much at mak-

2^6 Strictly Business

ing calls. It's generally the side entrance for mine. And,
besides, I'm engaged to a girl that has the Delaware peach
crop killed in the blossom. She's a parlor maid in a house
where I deliver goods. She won't be working there much
longer, though. Say, don't forget to give your friend my
grandfather's best regards. You'll excuse me now; my
wagon's outside with a lot of green stuff that's got to be
delivered. See you again, sir."

At eleven Thomas delivered some bunches of parsley
and lettuce at the Spraggins mansion. Thomas was only
twenty-two; so, as he came back, he took out the handful
of five-hundred-dollar bills and waved them carelessly.
Annette took a pair of eyes as big as creamed onions to the
cook.

"I told you he was a count," she said, after relating.
"He never would carry on with me."

"But you say he showed money," said the cook.

"Hundreds of thousands," said Annette. "Carried
around loose in his pockets. And he never would look
at me."

"It was paid to me to-day," Thomas was explaining to
Celia outside. "It came from my grandfather's estate.
Say, Cele, what's the use of waiting now ? I'm going to quit
the job to-night. Why can't we get married next week ? "

" Tommy," said Celia, " I'm no parlor maid. I've been
fooling you. I'm Miss Spraggins — Celia Spraggins. The
newspapers say I'll be worth forty million dollars some day."

A Night in New Arabia 227

Thomas pulled his cap down straight on his head for
the first time since we have known him.

"I suppose then," said he, *'I suppose then you'll not
be marrying me next week. But you can whistle.'*

" No," said Celia, "I'll not be marrying you next week.
My father would never let me marry a grocer's clerk. But
I'll marry you to-night. Tommy, if you say so."

Old Jacob Spraggins came home at 9:30 p. m., in his
motor car. The make of it you will have to surmise sorrow-
fully; I am giving you unsubsidized fiction; had it been a
street car I could have told you its voltage and the number
of flat wheels it had. Jacob called for his daughter; he
had bought a ruby necklace for her, and wanted to hear
her say what a kind, thoughtful, dear old dad he was.

There was a brief search in the house for her, and then
came Annette, glowing with the pure flame of truth and
loyalty well mixed with envy and histrionics.

" Oh, sir," said she, wondering if she should kneel,
" Miss Celia's just this minute running away out of the side
gate with a young man to be married. I couldn't stop
her, sir. They went in a cab."

" What young man ? " roared old Jacob.

" A millionaire, if you please, sir — a rich nobleman in
disguise. He carries his money with him, and the red
peppers and the onions was only to blind us, sir. He
never did seem to take to me."

Jacob rushed out in time to catch his car. The chauf-

S28 Strictly Business

feur had been delayed by trying to light a cigarette in the
wind.

*' Here, Gaston, or Mike, or whatever you call yourself,
scoot around the corner quicker than blazes and see if you
can see a cab. If you do, run it down."

There was a cab in sight a block away. Gaston, or
Mike, with his eyes half shut and his mind on his cigar-
ette, picked up the trail, neatly crowded the cab to the
curb and pocketed it.

" What fell you doin' ? " yelled the cabman.

*' Pa!" shrieked Celia.

" Grandfather's remorseful friend's agent! "said Thomas.
** Wonder what's on his conscience now."

"A thousand thunders!" said Gaston, or Mike. "I
have no other match."

*' Young man," said old Jacob, severely, "how about
that parlor maid you were engaged to ? "

A couple of years afterward old Jacob went into the
office of his private secretary.

"The Amalgamated Missionary Society solicits a con-
tribution of $30,000 toward the conversion of the Ko-
reans," said the secretary.

"Pass 'em up," said Jacob.

" The University of Plumville writes that its yearly endow-
ment fund of $50,000 that you bestowed upon it is past due."

"Tell 'em it's been cut out."

A Night in New Arabia 229

"The Scientific Society of Clam Cove, Long Island,
asks for $10,000 to buy alcohol to preserve specimens."

"Waste basket."

"The Society for Providing Healthful Recreation for
Working Girls wants $20,000 from you to lay out a golf
course."

" Tell 'em to see an undertaker."

"Cut 'em all out," went on Jacob. "I've quit being
a good thing. I need every dollar I can scrape or save.
I want you to write to the directors of every company that
I'm interested in and recommend a 10 per cent, cut in
salaries. And say — I noticed half a cake of soap lying
in a corner of the hall as I came in. I want you to speak
to the scrubwoman about waste. I've got no money to
throw away. And say — we've got vinegar pretty well
in hand, haven't we ? "

"The Globe Spice & Seasons Company," said the
secretary, " controls the market at present."

"Raise vinegar two cents a gallon. Notify all our
branches."

Suddenly Jacob Spraggins's plump red face relaxed
into a pulpy grin. He walked over to the secretary's desk
and showed a small red mark on his thick forefinger.

"Bit it," he said, "darned if he didn't, and he ain't
had the tooth three weeks — Jaky McLeod, my Celia's
kid. He'll be worth a hundred millions by the time he's
twenty-one if I can pile it up for him."

230 Strictly Business

As he was leaving, old Jacob turned at the door, and
said :

"Better make that vinegar raise three cents instead of
two. I'll be back in an hour and sign the letters."

The true history of the Caliph Harun Al Rashid
relates that toward the end of his reign he wearied of phi-
lanthropy, and caused to be beheaded all his former favor-
ites and companions of his "Arabian Nights" rambles.
Happy are we in these days of enlightenment, when the only
death warrant the caliphs can serve on us is in the form of
a tradesman's bill.

XVIII

THE GIRL AND THE HABIT

Habit — a tendency or aptitude acquired by custom or fre-
quent repetition.

XHE critics have assailed every source of inspiration
save one. To that one we are driven for our moral theme.
When we levied upon the masters of old they gleefully
dug up the parallels to our columns. When we strove to
set forth real life they reproached us for trying to imitate
Henry George, George Washington, Washington Irving
and Irving Bacheller. We wrote of the West and the East,
and they accused us of both Jesse and Henry James. We
wrote from our heart — and they said something about a
disordered liver. We took a text from Matthew or — er —
yes, Deuteronomy, but the preachers were hammering
away at the inspiration idea before we could get into type.
So, driven to the wall, we go for our subject-matter to the
reliable, old, moral, unassailable vade mecum — the
unabridged dictionary.

Miss Merriam was cashier at Hinkle's. Hinkle's is one
of the big downtown restaurants. It is in what the papers
call the "financial district," Each day from 12 o'clock to 2

9S1

232 Strictly Business

Hinkle's was full of hungry customers — messenger boys,
stenographers, brokers, owners of mining stock, promoters,
inventors with patents pending — and also peoplewith money.

The cashiership at Hinkle's was no sinecure. Hinkle
egged and toasted and griddle-caked and coffeed a good
many customers; and he lunched (as good a word as
"dined") many more. It might be said that Hinkle's
breakfast crowd was a contingent, but his luncheon
patronage amounted to a horde.

Miss Merriam sat on a stool at a desk inclosed on three
sides by a strong, high fencing of woven brass wire.
Through an arched opening at the bottom you thrust
your waiter's check and the money, while your heart went
pit-a-pat.

For Miss Merriam was lovely and capable. She could
take 45 cents out of a $2 bill and refuse an offer of mar-
riage before you could — Next ! — lost your chance —
please don't shove. She could keep cool and collected
while she collected your check, give you the correct change,
win your heart, indicate the toothpick stand, and rate you
to a quarter of a cent better than Bradstreet could to a
thousand in less time than it takes to pepper an egg with
one of Hinkle's casters.

There is an old and dignified allusion to the "fierce
light that beats upon a throne." The light that beats
upon the young lady cashier's cage is also something fierce.
The other fellow is responsible for the slang.

The Girl and the Habit 233

Every male patron of Hinkle's, from the A. D. T.
boys up to the curbstone brokers, adored Miss Merriam.
When they paid their checks they wooed her with every
wile known to Cupid's art. Between the meshes of the
brass railing went smiles, winks, compliments, tender
vows, invitations to dinner, sighs, languishing looks and
merr}^ banter that was wafted pointedly back by the gifted
Miss Merriam.

There is no coign of vantage more effective than the
position of young lady cashier. She sits there, easily
queen of the court of commerce; she is duchess of dollars
and devoirs, countess of compliments and coin, leading
lady of love and luncheon. You take from her a smile and
a Canadian dime, and you go your way uncomplaining.
You count the cheery word or two that she tosses you as
misers count their treasures; and you pocket the change
for a five uncomputed. Perhaps the brass-bound inacces-
sibility multiplies her charms — anyhow, she is a shirt-
waisted angel, immaculate, trim, manicured, seductive,
bright-eyed, ready, alert — Psyche, Circe and Ate in one,
separating you from your circulating medium after your
sirloin medium.

The young men who broke bread at Hinkle's never
settled with the cashier without an exchange of badinage
and open compliment. Many of them went to greater
lengths and dropped promisor}' hints of theatre tickets and
chocolates. The older men spoke plainly of orange bios-

234 Strictly Business

soms, generally withering the tentative petals by after-
allusions to Harlem flats. One broker, who had been
squeezed by copper proposed to Miss Merriam more
regularly than he ate.

During a brisk luncheon hour Miss Merriam's conver-
sation, while she took money for checks, would run some-
thing like this:

*' Good morning, Mr. Haskins — sir ? — it's natural,
thank you — don't be quite so fresh . . . Hello,
Johnny — ten, fifteen, twenty — chase along now or they'll
take the letters off your cap . . . Beg pardon —
count it again, please — oh, don't mention it . . .
Vaudeville? — thanks; not on your moving picture — I
was to see Carter in Hedda Gabler on Wednesday night
with Mr. Simmons . . . 'Scuse me, I thought that
was a quarter . . . Twenty-five and seventy-five's
a dollar — got that ham-and-cabbage habit yet. I see,
Billy . . . Who are you addressing ? — say — you'll
get all that's coming to you in a minute . . . Oh,
fudge! Mr. Bassett — you're always fooling — no — ?
Well, maybe I'll marry you some day — three, four and
sixty-five is five . . . Kindly keep them remarks to
yourself, if you please . . . Ten cents ? — 'scuse
me; the check calls for seventy — well, maybe it is a one
instead of a seven . . . Oh, do you like it that way,
Mr. Saunders? — some prefer a pomp; but they say this
Cleo de Merody does suit refined features , . . and

The Girl and the Habit 235

ten is fifty . . . Hike along there, buddy; don't take
this for a Coney Island ticket booth . . . Huh ? —
why, Macy's — don't it fit nice ? Oh, no, it isn't too cool
— these light-weight fabrics is all the go this season
. . . Come again, please — that's the third time you've
tried to — what ? — forget it — that lead quarter is an
old friend of mine . . . Sixty-five ? — must have had
your salary raised, Mr. Wilson ... I seen you on
Sixth Avenue Tuesday afternoon, Mr. De Forest —
swell ? — oh, my ! — who is she ? . , , What's the
matter with it ? — why, it ain't money — what ? — Colum-
bian half ? — well, this ain't South America . . . Yes,
I like the mixed best — Friday ? — a^vfully sorry, but I
take my jiu-jitsu lesson on Friday — Thursday, then
. . . Thanks — that's sixteen times I've been told
that this morning — I guess I must be beautiful . . .
Cut that out, please — who do you think I am ? . . .
Why, Mr. Westbrook — do you really think so ? — the
idea! — one — eighty and twenty's a dollar — thank you
ever so much; but I don't ever go automobile riding with
gentlemen — your aunt ? — well, that's different — per-
haps . . . Please don't get fresh — your check was
fifteen cents, I believe — kindly step aside and let . . .
Hello, Ben — coming around Thursday evening ? —
there's a gentleman going to send around a box of choco-
lates, and . . . forty and sixty is a dollar, and one is
two . . . "

236 Strictly Business

About the middle of one afternoon the dizzy goddess
Vertigo — whose other name is Fortune — suddenly
smote an old, wealthy and eccentric banker while he was
walking past Hinkle's, on his way to a street car. A
wealthy and eccentric banker who rides in street cars is —
move up, please ; there are others.

A Samaritan, a Pharisee, a man and a policeman who
were first on the spot lifted Banker McRamsey and carried
him into Hinkle's restaurant. When the aged but inde-
structible banker opened his eyes he saw a beautiful vision
bending over him with a pitiful, tender smile, bathing his
forehead with beef tea and chafing his hands with some-
thing frappe out of a chafing-dish. Mr. McRamsey sighed,
lost a vest button, gazed with deep gratitude upon his fair
preserveress, and then recovered consciousness.

To the Seaside Library all who are anticipating a
romance ! Banker McRamsey had an aged and respected
wife, and his sentiments toward Miss Merriam were
fatherly. He talked to her for half an hour with interest
— not the kind that went with his talks during business
hours. The next day he brought Mrs. McRamsey down
to see her. The old couple were childless — they had only
a married daughter living in Brooklyn.

To make a short story shorter, the beautiful cashier
won the hearts of the good old couple. They came to
Hinkle's again and again; they invited her to their old-
fashioned but splendid home in one of the East Seventies,

The Girl and the Habit 237

Miss Merriam's winning loveliness, her sweet frankness
and impulsive heart took them by storm. They said a
hundred times that Miss Merriam reminded them so much
of their lost daughter. The Brooklyn matron, nee Ram-
sey, had the figure of Buddha and a face like the ideal of
an art photographer. Miss Merriam was a combination
of curves, smiles, rose leaves, pearls, satin and hair-tonic
posters. Enough of the fatuity of parents.

A month after the worthy couple became acquainted
with Miss Merriam, she stood before Hinkle one afternoon
and resigned her cashiership.

"They're going to adopt me,'* she told the bereft res-
taurateur. "They're funny old people, but regular dears.
And the swell home they have got! Say, Hinkle, there
isn't any use of talking — I'm on the k la carte to wear
brown duds and goggles in a whiz wagon, or marry a duke
at least. Still, I somehow hate to break out of the old
cage. I've been cashiering so long I feel funny doing
anything else. I'll miss joshing the fellows awfully when
they line up to pay for the buckwheats and. But I can't
let this chance slide. And they're awfully good, Hinkle;
I know I'll have a swell time. You owe me nine-sixty-two
and a half for the week. Cut out the half if it hurts you,
Hinkle."

And they did. Miss Merriam became Miss Rosa
McRamsey. And she graced the transition. Beauty is
only skin-deep, but the nerves lie very near to the skin.

238 Strictly Business

Nerve — but just here will you oblige by perusing again
the quotation with which this story begins ?

The McRamseys poured out money like domestic cham-
pagne to polish their adopted one. Milliners, dancing
masters and private tutors got it. Miss — er — McRam-
sey was grateful, loving, and tried to forget Hinkle's. To
give ample credit to the adaptability of the American girl,
Hinkle's did fade from her memory and speech most of
the time.

Not every one will remember when the Earl of Hites-

bury came to East Seventy Street, America. He was

only a fair-to-medium earl, without debts, and he created
little excitement. But you will surely remember the even-
ing when the Daughters of Benevolence held their bazaar

in the W f-A a Hotel. For you were there, and you

wrote a note to Fannie on the hotel paper, and mailed it,
just to show her that — you did not ? Very well ; that
was the evening the baby was sick, of course.

At the Bazaar the McRamseys were prominent. Miss
Mer — er — McRamsey was exquisitely beautiful. The
Earl of Hitesbury had been very attentive to her since he
dropped in to have a look at America. At the charity
bazaar the affair was supposed to be going to be pulled
off to a finish. An earl is as good as a duke. Better. His
standing may be lower, but his outstanding accounts are
also lower.

Our ex-young-lady-cashier was assigned to a booth.

The Girl and the Habit 239

She was expected to sell worthless articles to nobs and
snobs at exorbitant prices. The proceeds of the bazaar
were to be used for giving to the poor children of the slums

a Christmas din Say ! did you ever wonder where

they get the other 364 ?

Miss McRamsey — beautiful, palpitating, excited,
charming, radiant — fluttered about in her booth. An
imitation brass network, with a little arched opening,
fenced her in.

Along came the Earl, assured, delicate, accurate, admir-
ing — admiring greatly, and faced the open wicket.

"You look chawming, you know — *pon my word you
do — my deah," he said, beguilingly.

Miss McRamsey whirled around.

"Cut that joshing out," she said, coolly and briskly.
"Who do you tliink you are talking to.? Your check,
please. Oh, lordy! "

Patrons of the bazaar became aware of a commotion
and pressed around a certain booth. The Earl of Hites-
bury stood near by pulling a pale blond and puzzled
whisker.

"Miss McRamsey has fainted,'* some one explained.

XIX

PROOF OF THE PUDDING

Spring winked a vitreous optic at Editor Westbrook, of
the Minerva Magazine, and deflected him from his course.
He had lunched in his favorite corner of a Broadway hotel,
and was returning to his office when his feet became
entangled in the lure of the vernal coquette. Which is
by way of saying that he turned eastward in Twenty-sixth
Street, safely forded the spring freshet of vehicles in Fifth
Avenue, and meandered along the walks of budding
Madison Square.

The lenient air and the settings of the little park almost
formed a pastoral ; the color motif was green — the pre-
siding shade at the creation of man and vegetation.

The callow grass between the walks was the color of
verdigris, a poisonous green, reminiscent of the horde of
derelict humans that had breathed upon the soil during the
summer and autumn. The bursting tree buds looked
strangely familiar to those who had botanized among the
garnishings of the fish course of a forty-cent dinner. The
sky above was of that pale aquamarine tint that ballroom
poets rhyme with "true" and "Sue" and "coo." The

240

Proof of the Pudding 241

one natural and frank color visible was the ostensible green
of the newly painted benches — a shade between the color
of a pickled cucumber and that of a last year's fast-black
cravenette raincoat. But, to the city-bred eye of Editor
Westbrook, the landscape appeared a masterpiece.

And now, whether you are of those who rush in, or of
the gentle concourse that fears to tread, you must follow in
a brief invasion of the editor's mind.

Editor Westbrook's spirit was contented and serene.
The April number of the Minerva had sold its entire edition
before the tenth day of the month — a newsdealer in
Keokuk had written that he could have sold fifty copies
more if he had had 'em. The owners of the magazine had
raised his (the editor's) salar^^; he had just installed in his
home a jewel of a recently imported cook who was afraid
of policemen; and the morning papers had published in
full a speech he had made at a publishers' banquet. Also
there were echoing in his mind the jubilant notes of a
splendid song that his charming young wife had sung to
him before he left his up-town apartment that morning.
She was taking enthusiastic interest in her music of late,
practising early and diligently. When he had compli-
mented her on the improvement in her voice she had fairly
hugged him for joy at his praise. He felt, too, the benign,
tonic medicament of the trained nurse. Spring, tripping
softly adown the wards of the convalescent city.

While Editor Westbrook was sauntering between the

242 Strictly Business

rows of park benches (already filling with vagrants and the
guardians of lawless childhood) he felt his sleeve grasped
and held. Suspecting that he was about to be panhandled,
he turned a cold and unprofitable face, and saw that his
captor was — Dawe — Shackleford Dawe, dingy, almost
ragged, the genteel scarcely visible in him through the
deeper lines of the shabby.

While the editor is pulling himself out of his surprise,
a flashlight biography of Dawe is offered.

He was a fiction writer, and one of Westbrook's old
acquaintances. At one time they might have called each
other old friends. Dawe had some money in those days,
and lived in a decent apartment house near Westbrook's.
The two families often went to theatres and dinners
together. Mrs. Dawe and Mrs. Westbrook became
*' dearest" friends. Then one day a little tentacle of the
octopus, just to amuse itself, ingurgitated Dawe's capital,
and he moved to the Gramercy Park neighborhood where
one, for a few groats per week, may sit upon one's trunk
under eight-branched chandeliers and opposite Carrara
marble mantels and watch the mice play upon the floor.
Dawe thought to live by writing fiction. Now and then
he sold a story. He submitted many to Westbrook.
The Minerva printed one or two of them; the rest were
returned. Westbrook sent a careful and conscientious per-
sonal letter with each rejected manuscript, pointing out in
detail his reasons for considering it unavailable. Editor

Proof of the Pudding 243

Westbrook had his own clear conception of what consti-
tuted good fiction. So had Dawe. Mrs. Dawe was
mainly concerned about the constituents of the scanty
dishes of food that she managed to scrape together. One
day Dawe had been spouting to her about the excellencies
of certain French writers. At dinner they sat down to a
dish that a hungry schoolboy could have encompassed at
a gulp. Dawe commented.

"It's Maupassant hash," said Mrs. Dawe. "It may
not be art, but I do wish you would do a five-course Marion
Crawford serial with an Ella Wheeler Wilcox sonnet for
dessert. I'm hungry."

As far as this from success was Shackleford Dawe when
he plucked Editor Westbrook's sleeve in Madison Square.
That was the first time the editor had seen Dawe in sev-
eral months.

"Why, Shack, is this you .^" said Westbrook, somewhat
awkwardly, for the form of his phrase seemed to touch
upon the other's changed appearance.

" Sit down for a minute," said Dawe, tugging at his sleeve.
"This is my office. I can't come to yours, looking as I do.
Oh, sit down — you won't be disgraced. Those half-
plucked birds on the other benches will take you for a swell
porch-climber. They won't know you are only an editor."

"Smoke, Shack?" said Editor Westbrook, sinking
cautiously upon the virulent green bench. He always
yielded gracefully when he did yield.

244 Strictly Business

Dawe snapped at the cigar as a kingfisher darts at a sun-
perch, or a girl pecks at a chocolate cream.

"I have just " began the editor.

"Oh, I know; don't finish," said Dawe. "Give me a
match. You have just ten minutes to spare. How did
you manage to get past my office-boy and invade my sanc-
tum.^ There he goes now, throwing his club at a dog
that couldn't read the 'Keep off the Grass' signs."

"How goes the writing?" asked the editor.

"Look at me," said Dawe, "for your answer. Now
don't put on that embarrassed, friendly-but-honest look
and ask me why I don't get a job as a wine agent or a
cab driver. I'm in the fight to a finish. I know I can
write good fiction and I'll force you fellows to admit it
yet. I'll make you change the spelling of * regrets' to
*c-h-e-q-u-e ' before I'm done with you."

Editor Westbrook gazed through his nose-glasses with
a sweetly sorrowful, omniscient, sympathetic, skeptical
expression — the copyrighted expression of the editor
beleaguered by the unavailable contributor.

" Have you read the last story I sent you — * The Alarum
of the Soul' ?" asked Dawe.

" Carefully. I hesitated over that story. Shack, really I
did. It had some good points. I was writing you a letter
to send with it when it goes back to you. I regret '*

"Never mind the regrets," said Dawe, grimly. "There's
neither salve nor stine: in 'em anv more. What I want to

Proof of the Pudding 24^5

know IS why. Come, now; out with the good points first.'*

"The story," said Westbrook, deliberately, after a sup-
pressed sigh, **is written around an almost original plot.
Characterization — the best you have done. Construc-
tion — almost as good, except for a few weak joints which
might be strengthened by a few changes and touches.
It was a good story, except "

"I can write English, can't I ?" interrupted Dawe.

**I have always told you," said the editor, "that you
had a style."

"Then the trouble is the "

"Same old thing," said Editor Westbrook. "You work
up to your climax like an artist. And then ycu turn your-
self into a photographer. I don't know what form of
obstinate madness possesses you. Shack, but that is what
you do with everything that you write. No, I will retract
the comparison with the photographer. Now and then
photography, in spite of its impossible perspective, man-
ages to record a fleeting glimpse of truth. But you spoil
every denouement by those flat, drab, obliterating strokes
of your brush that I have so often complained of. If you
would rise to the literary pinnacle of your dramatic scenes,
and paint them in the high colors that art requires, the
postman would leave fewer bulky, self-addressed enve-
lopes at your door."

"Oh, fiddles and footlights!" cried Dawe, derisively.
"You've got that old sawmill drama kink in your brain

246 Strictly Business

yet. When the man with the black mustache kidnaps
golden-haired Bessie you are bound to have the mother
kneel and raise her hands in the spotlight and say: 'May
high heaven witness that I will rest neither night nor day till
the heartless villain that has stolen me child feels the
weight of a mother's vengeance ! ' "

Editor Westbrook conceded a smile of impervious com-
placency.

"I think," said he, "that in real life the woman would
express herself in those words or in very similar ones."

**Not in a six hundred nights' run anywhere but on the
stage," said Dawe hotly. *'I'll tell you what she'd say
in real life. She'd say: *What! Bessie led away by a
strange man ? Good Lord ! It's one trouble after
another! Get my other hat, I must hurry around to the
police-station. Why wasn't somebody looking after her,
I'd like to know? For God's sake, get out of my way or
I'll never get ready. Not that hat — the brown one with
the velvet bows. Bessie must have been crazy; she's
usually shy of strangers. Is that too much powder?
Lordy! How I'm upset!'

''That's the way she'd talk," continued Dawe. "People
in real life don't fly into heroics and blank verse at emo-
tional crises. They simply can't do it. If they talk at
all on such occasions they draw from the same vocabulary
that they use every day, and muddle up their words and
ideas a little more, that's all."

Proof of the Pudding 247

"Shack," said Editor Westbrook impressively, "did
you ever pick up the mangled and lifeless form of a child
from under the fender of a street car, and carry it in your
arms and lay it down before the distracted mother ? Did
you ever do that and listen to the words of grief and de-
spair as they flowed spontaneously from her lips?"

"I never did," said Dawe. "Did you?"

"Well, no," said Editor Westbrook, with a slight frown.
"But I can well imagine what she would say."

"So can I," said Dawe.

And now the fitting time had come for Editor West-
brook to play the oracle and silence his opinionated con-
tributor. It was not for an unarrived fictionist to dic-
tate words to be uttered by the heroes and heroines of the
Minerva Magazine^ contrary to the theories of the editor
thereof.

"My dear Shack," said he, "if I know anything of life
I know that every sudden, deep and tragic emotion in the
human heart calls forth an apposite, concordant, con-
formable and proportionate expression of feeling. How
much of this inevitable accord between expression and
feeling should be attributed to nature, and how much to
the influence of art, it would be difficult to say. The sub-
limely terrible roar of the lioness that has been deprived
of her cubs is dramatically as far above her customary
whine and purr as the kingly and transcendent utterances
of Lear are above the level of his senile vaporings. But

248 Strictly Business

it is also true that all men and women have what may be
called a sub-conscious dramatic sense that is awakened
by a sufficiently deep and powerful emotion — a sense
unconsciously acquired from literature and the stage that
prompts them to express those emotions in language befit-
ting their importance and histrionic value."

"And in the name of the seven sacred saddle-blankets
of Sagittarius, where did the stage and literature get the
stunt ?" asked Dawe.

"From life," answered the editor, triumphantly.

The story writer rose from the bench and gesticulated
eloquently but dumbly. He was beggared for words with
which to formulate adequately his dissent.

On a bench nearby a frowzy loafer opened his red eyes
and perceived that his moral support was due a down-
trodden brother.

"Punch him one, Jack," he called hoarsely to Dawe.
"Wat's he come makin' a noise like a penny arcade for
amongst gen'lemen that comes in the Square to set and
think?"

Editor Westbrook looked at his watch with an affected
show of leisure.

"Tell me," asked Dawe, with truculent anxiety, "what
especial faults in *The Alarum of the Soul' caused you to
throw it down?"

"When Gabriel Murray," said Westbrook, "goes to his
telephone and is told that his fiancee has been shot by a

Proof of the Pudding 249

burglar, he says — I do not recall the exact words,
but "

"I do," said Dawe. "He says: *Damn Central; she
always cuts me off.' (And then to his friend) *Say,
Tommy, does a thirty-two bullet make a big hole ? It's
kind of hard luck, ain't it? Could you get me a drink
from the sideboard. Tommy? No; straight; nothing on
the side.'"

"And again," continued the editor, without pausing
for argument, "when Berenice opens the letter from hep
husband informing her that he has fled with the manicure
girl, her words are — let me see "

" She says," interposed the author : " * Well, what do you
think of that!'"

"Absurdly inappropriate words," said Westbrook,
" presenting an anti-climax — plunging the story into
hopeless bathos. Worse yet; they mirror life falsely.
No human being ever uttered banal colloquialisms when
confronted by sudden tragedy."

"Wrong," said Dawe, closing his unshaven jaws dog-
gedly. "I say no man or woman ever spouts * highfalutin '
talk when they go up against a real climax. They talk
naturally and a little worse."

The editor rose from the bench with his air of indul-
gence and inside information.

" Say, Westbrook," said Dawe, pinning him by the lapel,
"would you have accepted 'The Alarum of the Soul' if

250 Strictly Business

you had believed that the actions and words of the char-
acters were true to life in the parts of the story that we dis-
cussed?"

"It is very likely that I would, if I believed that way,"
said the editor. "But I have explained to you that I do
not."

"If I could prove to you that I am right .?"

"I'm sorry, Shack, but I'm afraid I haven't time to
argue any further just now."

"I don't want to argue," said Dawe. "I want to dem-
onstrate to you from life itself that my view is the correct
one."

"How could you do that?" asked Westbrook, in a sur-
prised tone.

"Listen," said the writer, seriously. "I have thought
of a way. It is important to me that my theory of true-
to-life fiction be recognized as correct by the magazines.
I've fought for it for three years, and I'm down to my last
dollar, with two months' rent due."

"I have applied the opposite of your theory," said the
editor, "in selecting the fiction for the Minerva Magazine.
The circulation has gone up from ninety thousand to "

"Four hundred thousand," said Dawe. "Whereas it
should have been boosted to a million."

"You said something to me just now about demonstrat-
ing your pet theory."

"I will. If you '11 give me about half an hour of your

Proof of the Pudding 251

time I'll prove to you that I am right. I'll prove it by
Louise."

"Your wife ! " exclaimed Westbrook. " How ? "

"Well, not exactly by her, but with her," said Dawe.
"Now, you know how devoted and loving Louise has
always been. She thinks I'm the only genuine prepara-
tion on the market that bears the old doctor's signature.
She's been fonder and more faithful than ever, since I've
been cast for the neglected genius part."

"Indeed, she is a charming and admirable life com-
panion," agreed the editor. "I remember what insep-
arable friends she and Mrs. Westbrook once were. We are
both lucky chaps, Shack, to have such wives. You must
bring Mrs. Dawe up some evening soon, and we'll have
one of those informal chafing-dish suppers that we used
to enjoy so much."

" Later," said Dawe. " WTien I get another shirt. And
now I'll tell you my scheme. AVhen I was about to leave
home after breakfast — if you can call tea and oatmeal
breakfast — Louise told me she was going to visit her
aunt in Eighty-ninth Street. She said she would return
home at three o'clock. She is always on time to a minute.
It is now "

Dawe glanced toward the editor's watch pocket.

"Twenty-seven minutes to three," said Westbrook,
scanning his time-piece.

"We have just enough time," said Dawe. "We will

252 Strictly Business

go to my flat at once. I will write a note, address it to her
and leave it on the table where she will see it as she enters
the door. You and I will be in the dining-room con-
cealed by the portieres. In that note I'll say that I have
fled from her forever with an affinity who understands
the needs of my artistic soul as she never did. When she
reads it we will observe her actions and hear her words.
Then we will know which theory is the correct one —
yours or mine."

"Oh, never!" exclaimed the editor, shaking his head.
"That would be inexcusably cruel. I could not consent
to have Mrs. Dawe's feelings played upon in such a
manner."

"Brace up," said the writer. "I guess I think as much
of her as you do. It's for her benefit as well as mine. I've
got to get a market for my stories in some way. It won't
hurt Louise. She's healthy and sound. Her heart goes as
strong as a ninety-eight-cent watch. It'll last for only a
minute, and then I'll step out and explain to her. You
really owe it to me to give me the chance, Westbrook."

Editor Westbrook at length yielded, though but half
willingly. And in the half of him that consented lurked
the vivisectionist that is in all of us. Let him who has not
used the scalpel rise and stand in his place Pity 'tis that
there are not enough rabbits and guinea-pigs to go around.

The two experimenters in Art left the Square and hur-
ried eastward and then to the south until they arrived in the

Proof of the Pudding 253

Gramercy neighborhood. Within its high iron raihngs
the Httle park had put on its smart coat of vernal green,
and was admiring itself in its fountain mirror. Outside
the railings the hollow square of crumbling houses, shells
of a bygone gentry, leaned as if in ghostly gossip over the
forgotten doings of the vanished quality. Sic transit
gloria urhis.

A block or two north of the Park, Dawe steered the edi-
tor again eastward, then, after covering a short distance,
into a lofty but narrow flathouse burdened with a floridly
over-decorated fa9ade. To the fifth story they toiled, and
Dawe, panting, pushed his latch-key into the door of one
of the front flats.

When the door opened Editor Westbrook saw, with feel-
ings of pity, how meanly and meagerly the rooms were
furnished.

"Get a chair, if you can find one," said Dawe, "while
I hunt up pen and ink. Hello, what's this ? Here's a note
from Louise. She must have left it there when she went
out this morning."

He picked up an envelope that lay on the centre-table
and tore it open. He began to read the letter that he drew
out of it; and once having begun it aloud he so read it
through to the end. These are the words that Editor
Westbrook heard :
"Dear Shackleford:

"By the time you get this I will be about a hundred miles

254 Strictly Business

away and still a-golng. I*ve got a place in the chorus of
the Occidental Opera Co., and we start on the road to-day
at twelve o'clock. I didn't want to starve to death, and
so I decided to make my own living. I'm not coming
back. Mrs. Westbrook is going with me. She said she
was tired of living with a combination phonograph, ice-
berg and dictionary, and she's not coming back, either.
We've been practising the songs and dances for two months
on the quiet. I hope you will be successful, and get along
all right. Good-bye. Louise."

Dawe dropped the letter, covered his face with his
trembling hands, and cried out in a deep, vibrating voice :

"My God, why hast thou given me this cup to drink?
Since she is false, then let Thy Heaven's fairest gifts, faith
and love, become the jesting by- words of traitors and fiends!'*

Editor Westbrook's glasses fell to the floor. The fingers
of one hand fumbled with a button on his coat as he
blurted between his pale lips:

''Say, Shack, ain't that a hell of a note? Wouldn't that
knock you off your perch. Shack? Ain't it hell, now. Shack
— ain't it?'*

XX

PAST ONE AT ROONEY'S

Only on the lower East Side of New York do the houses
of Capulet and Montagu survive. There they do not fight
by the book of arithmetic. If you but bite your thumb
at an upholder of your opposing house you have work
cut out for your steel. On Broadway you may drag your
man along a dozen blocks by his nose, and he will only
bawl for the watch; but in the domain of the East Side
Tybalts and Mercutios you must observe the niceties of
deportment to the wink of an eyelash and to an inch of
elbow room at the bar when its patrons include foes of
your house and kin.

So, when Eddie McManus, known to the Capulets as
Cork McManus, drifted into Dutch Mike's for a stein
of beer, and came upon a bunch of Montagus making
merrj' with the suds, he began to observe the strictest par-
liamentary rules. Courtesy forbade his leaving the
saloon with his thirst unslaked; caution steered him to a
place at the bar where the mirror supplied the cognizance
of the enemy's movements that his indifferent gaze seemed
to disdain; experience whispered to him that the finger

^5

256 Strictly Business

of trouble would be busy among the chattering steins at
Dutch Mike's that night. Close by his side drew Brick
Cleary, his Mercutio, companion of his perambulations.
Thus they stood, four of the Mulberry Hill Gang and two
of the Dry Dock Gang, minding their P's and Q's so
solicitously that Dutch Mike kept one eye on his custom-
ers and the other on an open space beneath his bar in which
it was his custom to seek safety whenever the ominous
politeness of the rival associations congealed into the
shapes of bullets and cold steel.

But we have not to do with the wars of the Mulberry
Hills and the Dry Docks. We must to Rooney's, where,
on the most blighted dead branch of the tree of life, a little
pale orchid shall bloom.

Overstrained etiquette at last gave way. It is not known
who first overstepped the bounds of punctilio; but the con-
sequences were immediate. Buck Malone, of the Mul-
berry Hills, with a Dewey-like swiftness, got an eight-
inch gun swung round from his hurricane deck. But
McManus's simile must be the torpedo. He glided in
under the guns and slipped a scant three inches of knife
blade between the ribs of the Mulberry Hill cruiser. Mean-
while Brick Cleary, a devotee to strategy, had skimmed
across the lunch counter and thrown the switch of the
electrics, leaving the combat to be waged by the light
of gunfire alone. Dutch Mike crawled from his haven
and ran into the street crying for the watch instead

i

Past One at Rooney^s 257

of for a Shakespeare to immortalize the Cimmerian
shindy.

The cop came, and found a prostrate, bleeding Montagu
supported by three distrait and reticent followers of the
House. Faithful to the ethics of the gangs, no one knew
whence the hurt came. There was no Capulet to be
seen.

"Raus mit der interrogatories," said Buck Malone to
the oflficer. "Sure I know who done it. I always man-
ages to get a bird's eye view of any guy that comes up an'
makes a show case for a hardware store out of me. No.
I'm not telling you his name. I'll settle with um meself.
Wow — ouch! Easy, boys! Yes, I'll attend to his case
meself. I'm not making any complaint."

At midnight McManus strolled around a pile of lumber
near an East Side dock, and lingered in the vicinity of a
certain water plug. Brick Cleary drifted casually to the
trysting place ten minutes later. "He'll maybe not
croak," said Brick; "and he won't tell, of course. But
Dutch Mike did. He told the police he was tired of
having his place shot up. It's unhandy just now, because
Tim Corrigan's in Europe for a week's end with Kings.
He'll be back on the Kaiser Williams next Friday. You'll
have to duck out of sight till then. Tim '11 fix it up all
right for us when he comes back."

This goes to explain why Cork McManus went into
Rooney's one night and there looked upon the bright.

^58 Strictly Business

stranger face of Romance for the first time in his pre-
carious career.

Until Tim Corrigan should return from his jaunt among
Kings and Princes and hold up his big white finger in pri-
vate oflBces, it was unsafe for Cork in any of the old haunts
of his gang. So he lay, perdu, in the high rear room of
a Capulet, reading pink sporting sheets and cursing the
slow paddle wheels of the Kaiser Wilhelm.

It was on Thursday evening that Cork's seclusion
became intolerable to him. Never a hart panted for water
fountain as he did for the cool touch of a drifting stein,
for the firm security of a foot-rail in the hollow of his shoe
and the quiet, hearty challenges of friendship and repartee
along and across the shining bars. But he must avoid the
district where he was known. The cops were looking
for him everywhere, for news was scarce, and the news-
papers were harping again on the failure of the police
to suppress the gangs. If they got him before Corrigan
came back, the big white finger could not be uplifted; it
would be too late then. But Corrigan would be home the
next day, so he felt sure there would be small danger in a
little excursion that night among the crass pleasures that
represented life to him.

At half-past twelve McManus stood in a darkish
cross-town street looking up at the name "Rooney's, "
picked out by incandescent lights against a signboard over
a second-story window. He had heard of the place as

Past One at Rooney^s ^59

a tough "hang-out"; with its frequenters and its locaHty
he was unfamiliar. Guided by certain unerring indi-
cations common to all such resorts, he ascended the stairs
and entered the large room over the cafe.

Here were some twenty or thirty tables, at this time
about half-filled with Rooney's guests. Waiters served
drinks. At one end a human pianola with drugged eyes
hammered the keys with automatic and furious unpre-
cision. At merciful intervals a waiter would roar or
squeak a song — songs full of "Mr. Johnsons" and
"babes" and "coons" — historical word guaranties of the
genuineness of African melodies composed by red waist-
coated young gentlemen, natives of the cotton fields and
rice swamps of West Twenty-eighth Street.

For one brief moment you must admire Rooney with me
as he receives, seats, manipulates, and chaffs his guests.
He is twenty-nine. He has Wellington's nose, Dante's
chin, the cheek-bones of an Iroquois, the smile of Talley-
rand, Corbett's foot work, and the poise of an eleven-year-
old East Side Central Park Queen of the May. He is
assisted by a lieutenant known as Frank, a pudgy, easy
chap, swell-dressed, who goes among the tables seeing that
dull care does not intrude. Now, what is there about
Rooney's to inspire all this pother? It is more than
respectable by daylight; stout ladies with children and
mittens and bundles and unpedigreed dogs drop up of
afternoons for a stein and a chat. Even by gaslight the

260 Strictly Business

diversions are melancholy i* the mouth — drink and rag-
time, and an occasional surprise when the waiter swabs
the suds from under your sticky glass. There is an
answer. Transmigration ! The soul of Sir Walter Raleigh
has traveled from beneath his slashed doublet to a kindred
home under Rooney's visible plaid waistcoat. Rooney*s
is twenty years ahead of the times. Rooney has removed
the embargo. Rooney has spread his cloak upon the
soggy crossing of public opinion, and any Elizabeth who
treads upon it is as much a queen as another. Attend to
the revelation of the secret. In Rooney*s ladies may
smoke !

McManus sat down at a vacant table. He paid for the
glass of beer that he ordered, tilted his narrow-brimmed
derby to the back of his brick-dust head, twined his feet
among the rungs of his chair, and heaved a sigh of con-
tentment from the breathing spaces of his innermost soul ;
for this mud honey was clarified sweetness to his taste.
The sham gaiety, the hectic glow of counterfeit hospitality,
the self-conscious, joyless laughter, the wine-born warmth,
the loud music retrieving the hour from frequent whiles
of awful and corroding silence, the presence of well-clothed
and frank-eyed beneficiaries of Rooney 's removal of the
restrictions laid upon the weed, the familiar blended odors
of soaked lemon peel, flat beer, and peau d^Espagne —
all these were manna to Cork McManus, hungry from his
week in the desert of the Capulet's high rear room.

Past One at Rooney^s 261

A girl, alone, entered Rooney's, glanced around with
leisurely swiftness, and sat opposite McManus at his table.
Her eyes rested upon him for two seconds in the look
with which woman reconnoitres all men whom she for the
first time confronts. In that space of time she will decide
upon one of two things — either to scream for the police,
or that she may marry him later on.

Her brief inspection concluded, the girl laid on the table
a worn red morocco shopping bag with the inevitable top-
gallant sail of frayed lace handkerchief flying from a cor-
ner of it. After she had ordered a small beer from the
immediate waiter she took from her bag a box of cigar-
ettes and lighted one with slightly exaggerated ease of man-
ner. Then she looked again in the eyes of Cork McManus
and smiled.

Instantly the doom of each was sealed.

The unqualified desire of a man to buy clothes and
build fires for a woman for a whole lifetime at first sight
of her is not uncommon among that humble portion of
humanity that does not care for Bradstreet or coats-of-arms
or Shaw's plays. Love at first sight has occurred a time
or two in high life; but, as a rule, the extempore mania
is to be found among unsophisticated creatures such as
the dove, the blue-tailed dingbat, and the ten-dollar-a-week
clerk. Poets, subscribers to all fiction magazines, and
schatchens, take notice.

With the exchange of the mysterious magnetic current

^62 Strictly Business

came to each of them the instant desire to lie, pretend,
dazzle, and deceive, which is the worst thing about the
hypocritical disorder known as love.

"Have another beer?" suggested Cork. In his circle
the phrase was considered to be a card, accompanied by
a letter of introduction and references.

"No, thanks," said the girl, raising her eyebrows and
choosing her conventional words carefully. "I — merely
dropped in for — a slight refreshment." The cigar-
ette between her fingers seemed to require explanation.
"My aunt is a Russian lady," she concluded, "and we
often have a post perannual cigarette after dinner at
home."

"Cheese it!" said Cork, whom society airs oppressed.
" Your fingers are as yellow as mine."

"Say," said the girl, blazing upon him with low-voiced
indignation, "what do you think I am? Say, who do
you think you are talking to ? What ? "

She was pretty to look at. Her eyes were big, brown,
intrepid and bright. Under her flat sailor hat, planted
jauntily on one side, her crinkly, tawny hair parted and
was drawn back, low and massy, in a thick, pendant knot
behind. The roundness of girlhood still lingered in
her chin and neck, but her cheeks and fingers were thin-
ning slightly. She looked upon the world with defiance,
suspicion, and sullen wonder. Her smart, short tan coat
was soiled and expensive. Two inches below her black

Past One at Rooney^s 263

dress dropped the lowest flounce of a heliotrope silk under-
skirt.

*' Beg your pardon," said Cork, looking at her admir-
ingly. " I didn't mean anything. Sure, it's no harm to
smoke, Maudy."

*' Rooney's," said the girl, softened at once by his amends,
" is the only place I know where a lady can smoke. Maybe
it ain't a nice habit, but aunty lets us at home. x4nd my
name ain't Maudy, if you please; it's Ruby Delamere."

** That's a swell handle," said Cork approvingly.
" Mine's McManus — Cor — er — Eddie McManus."

"Oh, you can't help that," laughed Ruby. ''Don't
apologize."

Cork looked seriously at the big clock on Rooney's wall.
The girl's ubiquitous eyes took in the movement.

"I know it's late," she said, reaching for her bag; "but
you know how you want a smoke when you want one.
Ain't Rooney's all right ? I never saw anything wrong
here. This is twice I've been in. I work in a bookbind-
er}- on Third Avenue. A lot of us girls have been working
overtime three nights a week. They won't let you smoke
there, of course. I just dropped in here on my way home
for a puff. Ain't it all right in here ? If it ain't, I won't
come any more."

" It's a little bit late for you to be out alone anj^where,"
said Cork. "I'm not wise to this particular joint; but
anyhow you don't want to have your picture taken in it

264 Strictly Business

for a present to your Sunday School teacher. Have one
more beer, and then say I take you home."

** But I don't know you," said the girl, with fine scrupu-
losity. " I don't accept the company of gentlemen I ain't
acquainted with. My aunt never would allow that."

'* Why," said Cork McManus, pulling his ear, " I'm the
latest thing in suitings with side vents and bell skirt when
it comes to escortin' a lady. You bet you'll find me all
right, Ruby. And I'll give you a tip as to who I am. My
governor is one of the hottest cross-buns of the Wall Street
push. Morgan's cab horse casts a shoe every time the old
man sticks his head out the window. Me! Well, I'm
in trainin' down the Street. The old man's goin' to put
a seat on the Stock Exchange in my stockin' my next
birthday. But it all sounds like a lemon to me. What
I like is golf and yachtin' and — er — well, say a corkin'
fast ten-round bout between welter-weights with walkin'
gloves."

"I guess you can walk to the door with me,'* said the
girl hesitatingly, but with a certain pleased flutter. " Still
I never heard anything extra good about Wall Street
brokers, or sports who go to prize fights, either. Ain't
you got any other recommendations ? "

" I think you're the swellest looker I've had my lamps
on in little old New York," said Cork impressively.

" That'll be about enough of that, now. Ain't you the
kidder!" She modified her chiding words by a deep.

Past One at Rooney^s ^Q5

long, beaming, smile-embellished look at her cavalier.
"We'll drink our beer before we go, ha?"

A waiter sang. The tobacco smoke grew denser, drifting
and rising in spirals, waves, tilted layers, cumulus clouds,
cataracts and suspended fogs like some fifth element
created from the ribs of the ancient four. Laughter and
chat grew louder, stimulated by Rooney's liquids and
Rooney's gallant hospitality to Lady Nicotine.

One o'clock struck. Down-stairs there was a sound of
closing and locking doors. Frank pulled down the green
shades of the front windows carefully. Rooney went
below in the dark hall and stood at the front door, his
cigarette cached in the hollow of his hand. Thenceforth
whoever might seek admittance must present a counten-
ance familiar to Rooney's hawk's eye — the countenance
of a true sport.

Cork McManus and the bookbindery girl conversed
absorbedly, with their elbows on the table. Their glasses
of beer were pushed to one side, scarcely touched, with the
foam on them sunken to a thin white scum. Since the
stroke of one the stale pleasures of Rooney's had become
renovated and spiced; not by any addition to the list of
distractions, but because from that moment the sweets
became stolen ones. The flattest glass of beer acquired
the tang of illegality; the mildest claret punch struck a
knockout blow at law and order; the harmless and genial
company became outlaws, defying authority and rule.

^66 Strictly Business

For after the stroke of one in such places as Rooney's,
where neither bed nor board is to be had, drink may not
be set before the thirsty of the city of the four milHon. It
is the law.

" Say," said Cork McManus, almost covering the table
with his eloquent chest and elbows, " was that dead straight
about you workin' in a bookbindery and livin' at home —
and just happenin' in here — and — and all that spiel
you gave me ? "

"Sure it was," answered the girl with spirit. "Why,
what do you think? Do you suppose I'd lie to you?
Go down to the shop and ask 'em. I handed it to you on
the level."

"On the dead level?" said Cork. "That's the way I
want it; because "

" Because what ? "

"I throw up my hands," said Cork. "You've got me
goin'. You're the girl I've been lookin' for. Will you
keep company with me, Ruby ? "

" Would you like me to — Eddie ? "

" Surest thing. But I wanted a straight story about —
about yourself, you know. When a fellow has a girl — a
steady girl — she's got to be all right, you know. She's
got to be straight goods."

" You'll find I'll be straight goods, Eddie."

" Of course you will. I believe what you told me. But
vou can't blame me for wantin' to find out. You don't

Past One at Rooney's 267

see many girls smokin' cigarettes in places like Rooney's
after midnight that are like you."

The girl flushed a little and lowered her eyes. "I see
that now," she said meekly. "I didn't know how bad it
looked. But I won't do it any more. And I'll go straight
home every night and stay there. And I'll give up cigar-
ettes if you say so, Eddie — I'll cut 'em out from this
minute on."

Cork's air became judicial, proprietary, condemnatory,
yet sympathetic. " A lady can smoke," he decided, slowly,
"at times and places. Why? Because it's bem' a lady
that helps her to pull it off."

"I'm going to quit. There's nothing to it," said the
girl. She flicked the stub of her cigarette to the floor.

"At times and places," repeated Cork. "When I call
round for you of evenin's we'll hunt out a dark bench in
Stuyvesant Square and have a puff or two. But no more
Rooney's at one o'clock — see ? "

" Eddie, do you really like me ? " The girl searched his
hard but frank features eagerly with anxious eyes.

"On the dead level."

" When are you coming to see me — where I live ? "

"Thursday — day after to-morrow evenin'. That suit

you.?"

"Fine. I'll be ready for you. Come about seven.
Walk to the door with me to-night and I'll show you
where I live. Don't forget, now. And don't you go to

268 Strictly Business

see any other girls before then, mister! I bet you will,
though."

"On the dead level," said Cork, "you make 'em all
look like rag-dolls to me. Honest, you do. I know when
I'm suited. On the dead level, I do."

Against the front door down-stairs repeated heavy blows
were delivered. The loud crashes resounded in the room
above. Only a trip-hammer or a policeman's foot could
have been the author of those sounds. Rooney jumped
like a bullfrog to a corner of the room, turned off the elec-
tric lights and hurried swiftly below. The room was left
utterly dark except for the winking red glow of cigars and
cigarettes. A second volley of crashes came up from
the assaulted door. A little, rustling, murmuring panic
moved among the besieged guests. Frank, cool, smooth,
reassuring, could be seen in the rosy glow of the burning
tobacco, going from table to table.

" All keep still ! " was his caution. " Don't talk or make
any noise ! Everything will be all right. Now, don't feel
the slightest alarm. We'll take care of you all."

Ruby felt across the table until Cork's firm hand closed
upon her's. "Are you afraid, Eddie?" she whispered.
" Are you afraid you'll get a free ride ? "

"Nothin' doin' in the teeth-chatterin' line," said Cork.
"I guess Rooney's been slow with his envelope. Don't
you worry, girly ; I'll look out for you all right."

Yet Mr. McManus's ease was only skin- and muscle-

Past One at Rooney^s 269

deep. With the police looking everywhere for Buck
Malone's assailant, and with Corrigan still on the ocean
wave, he felt that to be caught in a police raid would mean
an ended career for him. And just when he had met
Ruby, too! He wished he had remained in the high
rear room of the true Capulet reading the pink extras.

Rooney seemed to have opened the front door below
and engaged the police in conference in the dark hall.
The wordless low growl of their voices came up the stair-
way. Frank made a wireless news station of himself at
the upper door. Suddenly he closed the door, hurried to
the extreme rear of the room and lighted a dim gas jet.

"This Tvay, everybody!" he called sharply. "In a
hurry; but no noise, please!"

The guests crowded in confusion to the rear. Rooney's
lieutenant swung open a panel in the wall, overlooking
the back yard, revealing a ladder already placed for the
escape.

** Down and out, everybody! " he commanded. " Ladies
first! Less talking, please! Don't crowd! There's no
danger."

Among the last, Cork and Ruby waited their turn at the
open panel. Suddenly she swept him aside and clung
to his arm fiercely.

" Before we go out," she whispered in his ear — '* before

anything happens, tell me again, Eddie, do you I do

you really like me ? "

270 Strictly Business

" On the dead level," said Cork, holding her close with
one arm, ** when it comes to you, I'm all in.'*

When they turned they found they were lost and in dark-
ness. The last of the fleeing customers had descended.
Half way across the yard they bore the ladder, stumbling,
giggling, hurrying to place it against an adjoining low
building over the roof of which lay their only route to
safety.

" We may as well sit down," said Cork grimly. " Maybe
Rooney will stand the cops off, anyhow."

They sat at a table; and their hands came together
again.

A number of men then entered the dark room, feeling
their way about. One of them, Rooney himself, found
the switch and turned on the electric light. The other
man was a cop of the old regime — a big cop, a thick
cop, a fuming, abrupt cop — not a pretty cop. He went
up to the pair at the table and sneered familiarly at the girl.

" What are youse doin' in here .? " he asked.

" Dropped in for a smoke," said Cork mildly.

** Had any drinks .^ "

" Not later than one o'clock."

" Get out — quick ! " ordered the cop. Then, " Sit
down!" he countermanded.

He took off Cork's hat roughly and scrutinized him
shrewdly. "Your name's McManus."

"Bad guess," said Cork. "It's Peterson."

Past One at Rooney's 271

" Cork McManus, or something like thai," said the cop.
"You put a knife into a man in Dutch Mike's saloon a
week ago."

"Aw, forget it!" said Cork, who perceived a shade of
doubt in the officer's tones. " You've got my mug mixed
with somebody else's."

"Have I? Well, you'll come to the station with me,
anyhow, and be looked over. The description fits you
all right." The cop twisted his fingers under Cork's
collar. " Come on ! " he ordered roughly.

Cork glanced at Ruby. She was pale, and her thin nos-
trils quivered. Her quick eye danced from one man's
face to the other's as they spoke or moved. What hard
luck! Cork was thinking — Corrigan on the briny; and
Ruby met and lost almost within an hour! Somebody at
the police station would recognize him, without a doubt.
Hard luck!

But suddenly the girl sprang up and hurled herself
with both arms extended against the cop. His hold on
Cork's collar was loosened and he stumbled back two or
three paces.

"Don't go so fast, Maguire!" she cried in shrill fury.
" Keep your hands off my man ! You know me, and you
know I'm givin' you good advice. Don't you touch him
again ! He's not the guy you are lookin' for — I'll stand
for that."

" See here, Fanny," said the cop, red and angry, " I'll

272 Strictly Business

take you, too, if you don't look out! How do you know
this ain't the man I want ? What are you doing in here
with him?"

" How do I know ? " said the girl, flaming red and white
by turns. " Because I've known him a year. He's mine.
Oughtn't I to know ? And what am I doin' here with him ?
That's easy."

She stooped low and reached down somewhere into a
swirl of flirted draperies, heliotrope and black. An elastic
snapped, she threw on the table toward Cork a folded wad
of bills. The money slowly straightened itself with little
leisurely jerks.

" Take that, Jimmy, and let's go," said the girl. " I'm
declarin' the usual dividends, Maguire," she said to the
oflficer. " You had your usual five-dollar graft at the usual
corner at ten."

" A lie! " said the cop, turning purple. " You go on my
beat again and I'll arrest you every time I see you."

" No, you won't," said the girl. " And I'll tell you why.
Witnesses saw me give you the money to-night, and last
week, too. I've been getting fixed for you."

Cork put the wad of money carefully into his pocket,
and said: *'Come on, Fanny; let's have some chop suey
before we go home."

" Clear out, quick, both of you, or I'll "

The cop's bluster trailed away into inconsequential ity.

At the corner of the street the two halted. Cork handed

I

Past One at Rooney's 273

back the money without a word. The girl took it and
slipped it slowly into her hand-bag. Her expression was
the same she had worn when she entered Rooney's that
night — she looked upon the world with defiance, suspi-
cion and sullen wonder.

"I guess I might as well say good-by here," she said
dully. " You won't want to see me again, of course. Will
you — shake hands — Mr. McManus."

"I mightn't have got wise if you hadn't give the snap
away," said Cork. "Why did you do it.^"

"You'd have been pinched if I hadn't. That's why.
Ain't that reason enough.'^" Then she began to cry.
" Honest, Eddie, I was goin' to be the best girl in the world.
I hated to be what I am ; I hated men ; I was ready almost
to die when I saw you. And you seemed different from
everybody else. And when I found you liked me, too, why,
I thought I'd make you believe I was good, and I was goin'
to be good. When you asked to come to my house and
see me, why, I'd have died rather than do anything wrong
after that. But what's the use of talking about it ? I'll
say good-by, if you will, Mr. McManus."

Cork was pulling at his ear. " I knifed Malone," said
he. " I was the one the cop wanted."

" Oh, that's all right," said the girl listlessly. " It didn't
make any difference about that."

"That was all hot air about Wall Street. I don't do
nothin' but hang out with a tough gang on the East Side.'*

274 Strictly Business

" That was all right, too," repeated the girl. *' It didn't
make any difference."

Cork straightened himself, and pulled his hat down low.
" I could get a job at O'Brien's," he said aloud, but to him-
self.

" Good-by," said the girl.

"Come on," said Cork, taking her arm. "I know a
place."

Two blocks away he turned with her up the steps of a
red brick house facing a little park.

" What house is this ? " she asked, drawing back. " Why
are you going in there } "

A street lamp shone brightly in front. There was
a brass nameplate at one side of the closed front doors.
Cork drew her firmly up the steps. "Read that,"
said he.

She looked at the name on the plate, and gave a cry
between a moan and a scream. "No, no, no, Eddie!
Oh, my God, no! I won't let you do that — not now!
Let me go! You sha'n't do that! You can't — you
mus'n't! Not after you know! No, no! Come away
quick! Oh, my God! Please, Eddie, come!"

Half fainting, she reeled, and was caught in the bend
of his arm. Cork's right hand felt for the electric button
and pressed it long.

Another cop — how quickly they scent trouble when
trouble is on the wing ! — came along, saw them, and ran

Past One at Rooney's 275

up the steps. "Here! What are you doing with that
girl ? " he called gruflEly.

"She'll be all right in a minute," said Cork. "It's a
straight deal."

"Reverend Jeremiah Jones," read the cop from the
door-plate with true detective cunning.

" Correct," said Cork. " On the dead level, we're goin'
to get married."

XXI

THE VENTURERS

Let the story wreck itself on the spreading rails of the
Non Sequitur Limited, if it will; first you must take your
seat in the observation car ^^ Raison d*etre" for one mo-
ment. It is for no longer than to consider a brief essay on
the subject — let us call it: " What's Around the Corner."

Omne mundus in duas partes divisum est — men who
wear rubbers and pay poll-taxes, and men who discover
new continents. There are no more continents to dis-
cover; but by the time overshoes are out of date and the
poll has developed into an income tax, the other half will
be paralleling the canals of Mars with radium railways.

Fortune, Chance, and Adventure are given as synonyms
in the dictionaries. To the knowing each has a different
meaning. Fortune is a prize to be won. Adventure is
the road to it. Chance is what may lurk in the shadows
at the roadside. The face of Fortune is radiant and allur-
ing; that of Adventure flushed and heroic. The face of
Chance is the beautiful countenance — perfect because
vague and dream-born — that we see in our tea-cups at
breakfast while we growl over our chops and toast.

276

The Venturers 277

The Venturer is one who keeps his eye on the hedge-
rows and wayside groves and meadows while he travels
the road to Fortune. That is the difference between him
and the Adventurer. Eating the forbidden fruit was the
best record ever made by a Venturer. Trying to prove
that it happened is the highest work of the Adventuresome.
To be either is disturbing to the cosmogony of creation.
So, as bracket-sawed and city-directoried citizens, let us
light our pipes, chide the children and the cat, arrange
ourselves in the willow rocker under the flickering gas jet
at the coolest window and scan this little tale of two mod-
ern followers of Chance.

" Did you ever hear that story about the man from the
West ? " asked Billinger, in the little dark-oak room to your
left as you penetrate the interior of the Powhatan Club.

"Doubtless," said John Reginald Forster, rising and
leaving the room.

Forster got his straw hat (straws will be in and maybe
out again long before this is printed) from the check-room
boy, and walked out of the air (as Hamlet says). Billinger
was used to having his stories insulted and would not mind.
Forster was in his favorite mood and wanted to go away
from anywhere. A man, in order to get on good terms
with himself, must have his opinions corroborated and his
moods matched by some one else. (I had written that
"somebody"; but an A. D. T. boy who once took a tele-

278 Strictly Business

gram for me pointed out that I could save money by using
the compound word. This is a vice versa case.)

Forster's favorite mood was that of greatly desiring to
be a follower of Chance. He was a Venturer by nature,
but convention, birth, tradition and the narrowing influ-
ences of the tribe of Manhattan had denied him full privi-
lege. He had trodden all the main-traveled thoroughfares
and many of the side roads that are supposed to relieve
the tedium of life. But none had sufiiced. The reason
was that he knew what was to be found at the end of
every street. He knew from experience and logic almost
precisely to what end each digression from routine must
lead. He found a depressing monotony in all the vari-
ations that the music of his sphere had grafted upon the
tune of life. He had not learned that, although the world
was made round, the circle has been squared, and that its
true interest is to be found in *' What's Around the Corner.'*

Forster walked abroad aimlessly from the Powhatan,
trying not to tax either his judgment or his desire as to what
streets he traveled. He would have been glad to lose his
way if it were possible ; but he had no hope of that. Adven-
ture and Fortune move at your beck and call in the Greater
City; but Chance is oriental. She is a veiled lady in a
sedan chair, protected by a special traffic squad of drago-
mans. Crosstown, uptown, and downtown you may move
without seeing her.

At the end of an hour's stroll, Forster stood on a corner

The Venturers 279

of a broad, smooth avenue, looking disconsolately across
it at a picturesque old hotel softly but brilliantly lit. Dis-
consolately, because he knew that he must dine; and dining
in that hotel was no venture. It was one of his favorite
caravansaries, and so silent and swift would be the ser-
vice and so delicately choice the food, that he regretted
the hunger that must be appeased by the "dead per-
fection" of the place's cuisine. Even the music there
seemed to be always playing da capo.

Fancy came to him that he would dine at some cheap,
even dubious, restaurant lower down in the city, where
the erratic chefs from all countries of the world spread
their national cookery for the omnivorous American.
Something might happen there out of the routine — he
might come upon a subject without a predicate, a road
without an end, a question without an answer, a cause
without an effect, a gulf stream in life's salt ocean. He
had not dressed for evening; he wore a dark business
suit that would not be questioned even where the
waiters served the spaghetti in their shirt sleeves.

So John Reginald Forster began to search his clothes
for money; because the more cheaply you dine, the more
surely must you pay. All of the thirteen pockets, large and
small, of his business suit he explored carefully and found
not a penny. His bank book showed a balance of five
figures to his credit in the Old Ironsides Trust Company,
but

280 Strictly Business

Forster became aware of a man nearby at his left hand
who was really regarding him with some amusement. He
looked like any business man of thirty or so, neatly dressed
and standing in the attitude of one waiting for a street
car. But there was no car line on that avenue. So his
proximity and unconcealed curiosity seemed to Forster to
partake of the nature of a personal intrusion. But, as he
was a consistent seeker after " What's Around the Corner,"
instead of manifesting resentment he only turned a half-
embarrassed smile upon the other's grin of amusement.

** All in ? " asked the intruder, drawing nearer.

" Seems so," said Forster. '' Now, I thought there was
a dollar in "

" Oh, I know," said the other man, with a laugh. " But
there wasn't. I've just been through the same process
myself, as I was coming around the corner. I found in
an upper vest pocket — I don't know how they got there —
exactly two pennies. You know what kind of a dinner
exactly two pennies will buy ! "

**You haven't dined, then?" asked Forster.

*'I have not. But I would like to. Now, I'll make
you a proposition. You look like a man who would take
up one. Your clothes loQk neat and respectable. Excuse
personalities. I think mine will pass the scrutiny of a
head waiter, also. Suppose we go over to that hotel and
dine together. We will choose from the menu like mil-
lionaires — or, if you prefer, like gentlemen in moderate

The Venturers 281

circumstances dining extravagantly for once. When we
have finished we will match with my two pennies to see
which of us will stand the brunt of the house's displeasure
and vengeance. My name is Ives. I think we have lived
in the same station of life — before our money took wings."

"You're on," said Forster, joyfully.

Here was a venture at least within the borders of the
mysterious country of Chance — anyhow, it promised
something better than the stale infestivity of a table d'hote.

The two were soon seated at a corner table in the hotel
dining room. Ives chucked one of his pennies across the
table to Forster.

" Match for which of us gives the order," he said.

Forster lost.

Ives laughed and began to name liquids and viands to
the waiter with the absorbed but calm deliberation of one
who was to the menu born. Forster, listening, gave his
admiring approval of the order.

"I am a man," said Ives, during the oysters, "who has
made a lifetime search after the to-be-continued -in-our-
next. I am not like the ordinary adventurer who strikes
for a coveted prize. Nor yet am I like a gambler who
knows he is either to win or lose a certain set stake. What
I want is to encounter an adventure to which I can pre-
dict no conclusion. It is the breath of existence to me to
dare Fate in its blindest manifestations. The world has
come to run so much by rote and gravitation that you can

282 Strictly Business

enter upon hardly any footpath of chance in which you do
not find signboards informing you of what you may expect
at its end. I am hke the clerk in the Circumlocution
Office who always complained bitterly when any one came
in to ask information. * He wanted to know, you know ! '
was the kick he made to his fellow-clerks. Well, I don't
want to know, I don't want to reason, I don't want to
guess — I want to bet my hand without seeing it."

"I understand," said Forster delightedly. "I've often
wanted the way I feel put into words. You've done it.
I want to take chances on what's coming. Suppose we
have a bottle of Moselle with the next course."

"Agreed," said Ives. "I'm glad you catch my idea.
It will increase the animosity of the house toward the loser.
If it does not weary you, we will pursue the theme. Only
a few times have I met a true venturer — one who does not
ask a schedule and map from Fate when he begins a jour-
ney. But, as the world becomes more civilized and wiser,
the more difficult it is to come upon an adventure the end
of which you cannot foresee. In the Elizabethan days
you could assault the watch, wring knockers from doors
and have a jolly set-to with the blades in any convenient
angle of a wall and 'get away with it.' Nowadays, if you
speak disrespectfully to a policeman, all that is left to the
most romantic fancy is to conjecture in what particular
police station he will land you."

" I know — I know," said Forster, nodding approval.

The Venturers 283

"I returned to New York to-day," continued Ives,
"from a three years' ramble around the globe. Things
are not much better abroad than they are at home.
The whole world seems to be overrun by conclusions.
The only thing that interests me greatly is a premise. I've
tried shooting big game in Africa. I know what an express
rifle will do at so many yards; and when an elephant or a
rhinoceros falls to the bullet, I enjoy it about as much as
I did when I was kept in after school to do a sum in long
division on the blackboard."

" I know — I know," said Forster.

"There might be something in aeroplanes," went on
Ives, reflectively. "I've tried ballooning; but it seems
to be merely a cut-and-dried affair of wind and ballast."

" Women," suggested Forster, with a smile.

" Three months ago," said Ives. " I was pottering around
in one of the bazaars in Constantinople. I noticed a lady,
veiled, of course, but with a pair of especially fine eyes
visible, who was examining some amber and pearl orna-
ments at one of the booths. With her was an attendant —
a big Nubian, as black as coal. After a while this atten-
dant drew nearer to me by degrees and slipped a scrap of
paper into my hand. I looked at it when I got a chance.
On it was scrawled hastily in pencil : ' The arched gate of
the Nightingale Garden at nine to-night.' Does that
appear to you to be an interesting premise, Mr. Forster ? "

" Go on," said Forster eagerly.

284 Strictly Business

"I made inquiries and learned that the Nightingale
Garden was the property of an old Turk — a grand vizier,
or something of the sort. Of course I prospected for the
arched gate and was there at nine. The same Nubian
attendant opened the gate promptly on time, and I went
inside and sat on a bench by a perfumed fountain with the
veiled lady. We had quite an extended chat. She was
Myrtle Thompson, a lady journalist, who was writing up
the Turkish harems for a Chicago newspaper. She said
she noticed the New York cut of my clothes in the bazaar
and wondered if I couldn't work something into the metro-
politan papers about it.'*

" I see," said Forster. " I see."

" I've canoed through Canada," said Ives, " down many
rapids and over many falls. But I didn't seem to get what
I wanted out of it because I knew there were only two
possible outcomes — I would either go to the bottom or
arrive at the sea level. I've played all games at cards;
but the mathematicians have spoiled that sport by com-
puting the percentages. I've made acquaintances on
trains, I've answered advertisements, I've rung strange
door-bells, I've taken every chance that presented itself;
but there has always been the conventional ending — the
logical conclusion to the premise."

"I know," repeated Forster. "I've felt it all. But
I've had few chances to take my chance at chances. Is
there any life so devoid of impossibilities as life in this city ?

The Venturers 285

There seems to be a myriad of opportunities for testing
the undeterminable; but not one in a thousand fails to
land you where you expected it to stop. I wish the sub-
ways and street cars disappointed one as seldom.''

"The sun has risen," said Ives, "on the Arabian nights.
There are no more caliphs. The fisherman's vase is
turned to a vacuum bottle, warranted to keep any genie
boiling or frozen for forty-eight hours. Life moves by
rote. Science has killed adventure. There are no more
opportunities such as Columbus and the man who ate the
first oyster had. The only certain thing is that there is
nothing uncertain."

"Well," said Forster, "my experience has been the
limited one of a city man. I haven't seen the world as
you have; but it seems that we view it with the same opin-
ion. But, I tell you I am grateful for even this little ven-
ture of ours into the borders of the haphazard. There
may be at least one breathless moment when the bill for
the dinner is presented. Perhaps, after all, the pilgrims
who traveled without scrip or purse found a keener taste
to life than did the knights of the Round Table who rode
abroad with a retinue and King Arthur's certified checks
in the lining of their helmets. And now, if you've finished
your coffee, suppose we match one of your insufiicient
coins for the impending blow of Fate. What have
I up?"

"Heads," called Ives.

286 Strictly Business

"Heads it is," said Forster, lifting his hand. "I lose.
We forgot to agree upon a plan for the winner to escape.
I suggest that when the waiter comes you make a remark
about telephoning to a friend. I will hold the fort and
the dinner check long enough for you to get your hat and
be off. I thank you for an evening out of the ordinary,
Mr. Ives, and wish we might have others."

"If my memory is not at fault," said Ives, laughing,
"the nearest police station is in Macdougal Street. I
have enjoyed the dinner, too, let me assure you."

Forster crooked his finger for the waiter. Victor, with
a locomotive effort that seemed to owe more to pneumatics
than to pedestrianism, glided to the table and laid the card,
face downward, by the loser's cup. Forster took it up and
added the figures with deliberate care. Ives leaned back
comfortably in his chair.

"Excuse me," said Forster; "but I thought you were
going to ring up Grimes about that theatre party for
Thursday night. Had you forgotten about it ? "

"Oh," said Ives, settling himself more comfortably,
"I can do that later on. Get me a glass of water, waiter."

"Want to be in at the death, do you .?" asked Forster.

"I hope you don't object," said Ives, pleadingly.
"Never in my life have I seen a gentleman arrested in a
public restaurant for swindling it out of a dinner."

"All right," said Forster, calmly. "You are entitled
to see a Christian die in the arena as your pousse-cafe/*

The Venturers 287

Victor came with the glass of water and remained, with
the disengaged air of an inexorable collector.

Forster hesitated for fifteen seconds, and then took a
pencil from his pocket and scribbled his name on the din-
ner check. The waiter bowed and took it away.

"The fact is," said Forster, wuth a little embarrassed
laugh, "I doubt whether I'm what they call a *game sport,*
which means the same as a 'soldier of Fortune.' I'll have
to make a confession. I've been dining at this hotel two
or three times a week for more than a year. I always
sign my checks." And then, with a note of appreciation
in his voice: "It was first-rate of you to stay to see me
through with it when you knew I had no money, and that
you might be scooped in, too."

"I guess I'll confess, too," said Ives, with a grin. "I
own the hotel. I don't run it, of course, but I always keep
a suite on the third floor for my use when I happen to stray
into town."

He called a waiter and said: "Is Mr. Gilmore still
behind the desk ? All right. Tell him that Mr. Ives is here,
and ask him to have my rooms made ready and aired."

"Another venture cut short by the inevitable," said
Forster. "Is there a conundrum without an answer in
the next number ? But let's hold to our subject just for a
minute or two, if you will. It isn't often that I meet a
man who understands the flaws I pick in existence. I
am engaged to be married a month from to-day."

288 Strictly Business

" I reserve comment," said Ives.

"Right; I am going to add to the assertion. I am
devotedly fond of the lady; but I can't decide whether to
show up at the church or make a sneak for Alaska. It's
the same idea, you know, that we were discussing — it
does for a fellow as far as possibilities are concerned.
Everybody knows the routine — you get a kiss flavored
with Ceylon tea after breakfast; you go to the oflice; you
come back home and dress for dinner — theatre twice a
week — bills — moping around most evenings trying to
make conversation — a little quarrel occasionally — maybe
sometimes a big one, and a separation — or else a settling
down into a middle-aged contentment, which is worst of
all."

"I know," said Ives, nodding wisely.

"It's the dead certainty of the thing," went on Forster,
"that keeps me in doubt. There'll nevermore be any-
thing around the corner."

"Nothing after the * Little Church,'" said Ives. "I
know."

"Understand," said Forster, "that I am in no doubt
as to my feelings toward the lady. I may say that I love
her truly and deeply. But there is something in the cur-
rent that runs through my veins that cries out against any
form of the calculable. I do not know what I want; but I
know that I want it. I'm talking like an idiot, I suppose,
but I'm sure of what I mean."

The Venturers 289

** I understand you," said Ives, with a slow smile. " Well, I
think I will be going up to my rooms now. If you would dine
with me here one evening soon, Mr. Forster, I'd be glad."

" Thursday ? " suggested Forster.

"At seven, if it's convenient," answered Ives.

"Seven goes," assented Forster.

At half-past eight Ives got into a cab and was driven
to a number in one of the correct West Seventies. His card
admitted him to the reception room of an old-fashioned
house into which the spirits of Fortune, Chance and
Adventure had never dared to enter. On the walls were
the Whistler etchings, the steel engravings by Oh-what's-
his-name ?, the still-life paintings of the grapes and garden
truck with the watermelon seeds spilled on the table as
natural as life, and the Greuze head. It was a household.
There were even brass andirons. On a table was an album,
half-morocco, with oxidized-silver protections on the
corners of the lids. A clock on the mantel ticked loudly,
with a warning click at five minutes to nine. Ives looked
at it curiously, remembering a time-piece in his grand-
mother's home that gave such a warning.

And then down the stairs and into the room came Mary
Marsden. She was twenty-four, and I leave her to your
imagination. But I must say this much — youth and
health and simplicity and courage and greenish-violet
eyes are beautiful, and she had all these. She gave Ives
her hand with the sweet cordiality of an old friendship.

290 Strictly Business

"You can't think what a pleasure it is," she said, "to
have you drop in once every three years or so."

For half an hour they talked. I confess that I cannot
repeat the conversation. You will find it in books in the
circulating library. When that part of it was over, Mary
said:

"And did you find what you wanted while you were
abroad ? "

" What I wanted ? " said Ives.

"Yes. You know you were always queer. Even as a
boy you wouldn't play marbles or baseball or any game
with rules. You wanted to dive in water where you
didn't know whether it was ten inches or ten feet deep.
And when you grew up you were just the same. We've
often talked about your peculiar ways."

"I suppose I am an incorrigible," said Ives. "I am
opposed to the doctrine of predestination, to the rule of
three, gravitation, taxes and everything of the kind. Life
has always seemed to me something like a serial story
would be if they printed above each instalment a synopsis
of succeeding chapters."

Mary laughed merrily.

"Bob Ames told us once," she said, "of a funny thing
you did. It was when you and he were on a train in the
South, and you got off at a town where you hadn't intended
to stop just because the brakeman hung up a sign in the
end of the car with the name of the next station on it."

The Venturers ^01

"I remember," said Ives. "That 'next station' has
been the thing I've always tried to get away from."

"I know it," said Mary. "And youVe been very
fooHsh. I hope you didn't find what you wanted not to
find, or get off at the station where there wasn't any, or
whatever it was you expected wouldn't happen to you
during the three years you've been away.'*

" There was something I wanted before I went away,"
said Ives.

Mary looked in his eyes clearly, with a slight, but per-
fectly sweet smile.

"There was," she said. "You wanted me. And you
could have had me, as you very well know."

Without replying, Ives let his gaze wander slowly about
the room. There had been no change in it since last he
had been in it, three years before. He vividly recalled the
thoughts that had been in his mind then. The contents
of that room were as fixed, in their way, as the everlasting
hills. No change would ever come there except the
inevitable ones wrought by time and decay. That silver-
mounted album would occupy that corner of that table,
those pictures would hang on the walls, those chairs be
found in their same places every morn and noon and night
while the household hung together. The brass andirons
were monuments to order and stability. Here and there
were relics of a hundred years ago which were still living
mementos and would be for many years to come. One

292 Strictly Business

going from and coming back to that house would never
need to forecast or doubt. He would find what he left,
and leave what he found. The veiled lady, Chance,
would never lift her hand to the knocker on the outer door.

And before him sat the lady who belonged in the room.
Cool and sweet and unchangeable she was. She offered
no surprises. If one should pass his life with her, though
she might grow white-haired and wrinkled, he would never
perceive the change. Three years he had been away
from her, and she was still waiting for him as established
and constant as the house itself. He was sure that she
had once cared for him. It was the knowledge that she
would always do so that had driven him away. Thus his
thoughts ran.

" I am going to be married soon," said Mary.

On the next Thursday afternoon Forster came hurriedly
to Ives's hotel.

**01d man," said he, "we'll have to put that dinner off
for a year or so; I'm going abroad. The steamer sails at
four. That was a great talk we had the other night, and
it decided me. I'm going to knock around the world and
get rid of that incubus that has been weighing on both you
and me — the terrible dread of knowing what's going to
happen. I've done one thing that hurts my conscience
a little; but I know it's best for both of us. I've written
to the lady to whom I was engaged and explained every-

I

The Venturers 293

thing — told her plainly why I was leaving — that the
monotony of matrimony would never do for me. Don't
you think I was right ? "

" It is not for me to say," answered Ives. " Go ahead
and shoot elephants if you think it will bring the element
of chance into your life. We've got to decide these things
for ourselves. But I tell you one thing, Forster, I've found
the way. I've found out the biggest hazard in the world
— a game of chance that never is concluded, a venture
that may end in the highest heaven or the blackest pit.
It will keep a man on edge until the clods fall on his coflBn,
because he will never know — not until his last day, and
not then will he know. It is a voyage without a rudder or
compass, and you must be captain and crew and keep
watch, every day and night, yourself, with no one to relieve
you. I have found the Venture. Don't bother yourself
about leaving Mary Marsden, Forster. I married her
yesterday at noon."

xxn

THE DUEL

XHE gods, lying beside their nectar on 'Lympus and peep-
ing over the edge of the cUff, perceive a difference in cities.
Although it would seem that to their vision towns must
appear as large or small ant-hills without special character-
istics, yet it is not so. Studying the habits of ants from so
great a height should be but a mild diversion when
coupled with the soft drink that mythology tells us is their
only solace. But doubtless they have amused themselves
by the comparison of villages and towns ; and it will be no
news to them (nor, perhaps, to many mortals), that in one
particularity New York stands unique among the cities
of the world. This shall be the theme of a little story
addressed to the man who sits smoking with his Sabbath-
slippered feet on another chair, and to the woman who
snatches the paper for a moment while boiling greens or
a narcotized baby leaves her free. With these I love to
sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of
Kings.

New York City is inhabited by 4,000,000 mysterious
strangers; thus beating Bird Centre by three millions and

29i

The Duel 295

half a dozen nine's. They came here in various ways
and for many reasons — Hendrik Hudson, the art schools,
green goods, the stork, the annual dressmakers' convention,
the Pennsylvania Railroad, love of money, the stage, cheap
excursion rates, brains, personal column ads., heavy walk-
ing shoes, ambition, freight trains — all these have had a
hand in making up the population.

But every man Jack when he first sets foot on the stones
of Manhattan has got to fight. He has got to fight at once
until either he or his adversar}^ wins. There is no resting
between rounds, for there are no rounds. It is slugging
from the first. It is a fight to a finish.

Your opponent is the City. You must do battle with
it from the time the ferr^^-boat lands you on the island until
either it is yours or it has conquered you. It is the same
whether you have a million in your pocket or only the price
of a week's lodging.

The battle is to decide whether you shall become a New
Yorker or turn the rankest outlander and Philistine. You
must be one or the other. You cannot remain neutral.
You must be for or against — lover or enemy — bosom
friend or outcast. And, oh, the city is a general in the ring.
Not only by blows does it seek to subdue you. It woos
you to its heart with the subtlety of a siren. It is a com-
bination of Delilah, green Chartreuse, Beethoven, chloral
and John L. in his best days.

In other cities you may wander and abide as a stranger

296 Strictly Business

man as long as you please. You may live in Chicago
until your hair whitens, and be a citizen and still prate
of beans if Boston mothered you, and without rebuke.
You may become a civic pillar in any other town but
Knickerbocker's, and all the time publicly sneering at its
buildings, comparing them with the architecture of Col-
onel Telfair's residence in Jackson, Miss., whence you hail,
and you will not be set upon. But in New York you must
be either a New Yorker or an invader of a modern Troy,
concealed in the wooden horse of your conceited provin-
cialism. And this dreary preamble is only to introduce
to you the unimportant figures of William and Jack.

They came out of the West together, where they had been
friends. They came to dig their fortunes out of the big city.

Father Knickerbocker met them at the ferry, giving
one a right-hander on the nose and the other an uppercut
with his left, just to let them know that the fight was on.

William was for business ; Jack was for Art. Both were
young and ambitious; so they countered and clinched.
I think they were from Nebraska or possibly Missouri
or Minnesota. Anyhow, they were out for success and
scraps and scads, and they tackled the city like two Loch-
invars with brass knucks and a pull at the City Hall.

Four years afterward William and Jack met at luncheon.
The business man blew in like a March wind, hurled his
silk hat at a waiter, dropped into the chair that was pushed
under him, seized the bill of fare, and had ordered as far as

The Duel 297

cheese before the artist had time to do more than
nod. After the nod a humorous smile came into his eyes.

"Billy," he said, "you're done for. The city has gob-
bled you up. It has taken you and cut you to its pattern
and stamped you with its brand. You are so nearly like
ten thousand men I have seen to-day that you couldn't be
picked out from them if it weren't for your laundry marks."

" Camembert," finished William. " What's that ? Oh,
you've still got your hammer out for New York, have you ?
Well, little old Noisyville-on-the-Subway is good enough
for me. It's giving me mine. And, say, I used to think
the West was the whole round world — only slightly flat-
tened at the poles whenever Bryan ran. I used to yell my-
self hoarse about the free expense, and hang my hat on the
horizon, and say cutting things in the grocery to little soap
drummers from the East. But I'd never seen New York,
then. Jack. Me for it from the rathskellers up. Sixth
Avenue is the West to me now. Have you heard this
fellow Crusoe sing ? The desert isle for him, I say, but
my wife made me go. Give me May Irwin or E. S. Willard
any time."

" Poor Billy," said the artist, delicately fingering a cigar-
ette. " You remember, when we were on our way to the
East, how we talked about this great, wonderful city, and how
we meant to conquer it and never let it get the best of us ?
We were going to be just the same fellows we had
always been, and never let it master us. It has downed

298 Strictly Business

you, old man. You have changed from a maverick
into a butterick."

** Don't see exactly what you are driving at," said Wil-
liam. "I don't wear an alpaca coat with blue trousers
and a seersucker vest on dress occasions, like I used to do
at home. You talk about being cut to a pattern — well,
ain't the pattern all right ? When you're in Rome you've
got to do as the Dagoes do. This town seems to me to
have other alleged metropolises skinned to flag stations.
According to the railroad schedule I've got in my mind,
Chicago and Saint Jo and Paris, France, are asterisk stops
— which means you wave a red flag and get on every other
Tuesday. I like this little suburb of Tarrytown-on-the
Hudson. There's something or somebody doing all the
time. I'm clearing $8,000 a year selling automatic pumps,
and I'm living like kings-up. Why, yesterday, I was intro-
duced to John W. Gates. I took an auto ride with a wine
agent's sister. I saw two men run over by a street car,
and I seen Edna May play in the evening. Talk about
the West, why, the other night I woke everybody up in the
hotel hollering. I dreamed I was walking on a board side-
walk in Oshkosh. What have you got against this town.
Jack ? There's only one thing in it that I don't care for,
and that's a ferry-boat."

The artist gazed dreamily at the cartridge paper on the
wall. "This town," said he, "is a leech. It drains the
blood of the country. Whoever comes to it accepts a chal-

The Duel 299

lenge to a duel. Abandoning the figure of the leech, it is
a juggernaut, a Moloch, a monster to which the innocence,
the genius, and the beauty of the land must pay tribute.
Hand to hand every newcomer must struggle with the levi-
athan. You've lost, Billy. It shall never conquer me. I
hate it as one hates sin or pestilence or — the color work
in a ten-cent magazine. I despise its very vastness and
power. It has the poorest millionaires, the littlest great
men, the haughtiest beggars, the plainest beauties, the
lowest skyscrapers, the dolefulest pleasures of any town
I ever saw. It has caught you, old man, but I will never
run beside its chariot wheels. It glosses itself as the
Chinaman glosses his collars. Give me the domestic fin-
ish. I could stand a town ruled by wealth or one ruled
by an aristocracy; but this is one controlled by its lowest
ingredients. Claiming culture, it is the crudest; asseverat-
ing its pre-eminence, it is the basest; denying all outside
values and virtue, it is the narrowest. Give me the pure
air and the open heart of the West country. I would go
back there to-morrow if I could."

"Don't you like this filet mignon?'' said William.
*' Shucks, now, what's the use to knock the town ! It's the
greatest ever. I couldn't sell one automatic pump between
Harrisburg and Tommy O'Keefe's saloon, in Sacramento,
where I sell twenty here. And have you seen Sara Bern-
ard t in ' Andrew Mack ' yet ? "

"The town's got you, Billy," said Jack.

300 Strictly Business

"All right," said William. "I'm going to buy a cot-
tage on Lake Ronkonkoma next summer."

At midnight Jack raised his window and sat close to it.
He caught his breath at what he saw, though he had seen
and felt it a hundred times.

Far below and around lay the city like a ragged
purple dream. The irregular houses were like the broken
exteriors of cliffs lining deep gulches and winding streams.
Some were mountainous; some lay in long, monotonous
rows like the basalt precipices hanging over desert canons.
Such was the background of the wonderful, cruel, enchant-
ing, bewildering, fatal, great city. But into this back-
ground were cut myriads of brilliant parallelograms and
circles and squares through which glowed many colored
lights. And out of the violet and purple depths ascended
like the city's soul sounds and odors and thrills that make
up the civic body. There arose the breath of gaiety un-
restrained, of love, of hate, of all the passions that man
can know. There below him lay all things, good or bad,
that can be brought from the four corners of the earth to
instruct, please, thrill, enrich, despoil, elevate, cast down,
nurture or kill. Thus the flavor of it came up to him and
went into his blood.

There was a knock on his door. A telegram had come
for him. It came from the West, and these were its words :

" Come back home and the answer will be yes.

"Dolly."

The Duel 301

He kept the boy waiting ten minutes, and then wr( te the
reply: "Impossible to leave here at present.'* Tien he
sat at the window again and let the city put its cup of man-
dragora to his lips again.

After all it isn't a story; but I wanted to know which
one of the heroes won the battle against the city. So I went
to a very learned friend and laid the case before him. What
he said was: "Please don't bother me; I have Christmas
presents to buy."

So there it rests; and you will have to decide for yourself.

xxin

"WHAT YOU WANT"

Night had fallen on that great and beautiful city known
as Bagdad-on-the-Subway. And with the night came the
enchanted glamor that belongs not to Arabia alone. In
different masquerade the streets, bazaars and walled houses
of the occidental city of romance were filled with the same
kind of folk that so much interested our interesting old
friend, the late Mr. H. A. Rashid. They wore clothes
eleven hundred years nearer to the latest styles than H. A.
saw in the old Bagdad ; but they were about the same peo-
ple underneath. With the eye of faith, you could have
seen the Little Hunchback, Sinbad the Sailor, Fitbad the
Tailor, the Beautiful Persian, the one-eyed Calenders,
Ali Baba and Forty Robbers on every block, and the
Barber and his Six Brothers, and all the old Arabian gang
easily.

But let us revenue to our lamb chops.

Old Tom Crowley was a caliph. He had $42,000,000
in preferred stocks and bonds with solid gold edges. In
these times, to be called a caliph you must have money.
The old-style caliph business as conducted by Mr. Rashid

''What You WanV 303

is not safe. If you hold up a person nowadays in a bazaar
or a Turkish bath or a side street, and inquire into his pri-
vate and personal affairs, the police court'll get you.

Old Tom was tired of clubs, theatres, dinners, friends,
music, money and everything. That's what makes a
caliph — you must get to despise everything that money
can buy, and then go out and try to want something that
you can't pay for.

"I'll take a little trot around town all by myself," thought
old Tom, "and try if I can stir up anything new. Let's
see — it seems I've read about a king or a Cardiff giant
or something in old times who used to go about with false
whiskers on, making Persian dates with folks he hadn't
been introduced to. That don't listen like a bad idea. I
certainly have got a case of humdrumness and fatigue on
for the ones I do know. That old Cardiff used to pick
up cases of trouble as he ran upon 'em and give 'em gold — •
sequins, I think it was — and make 'em marry or got 'em
good Government jobs. Now, I'd like something of that
sort. My money is as good as his was even if the maga-
zines do ask me every month where I got it. Yes, I guess
I'll do a little Cardiff business to-night, and see how it
goes."

Plainly dressed, old Tom Crowley left his Madison Ave-
nue palace, and walked westward and then south. As he
stepped to the sidewalk. Fate, who holds the ends of the
strings in the central offices of all the enchanted cities,

304 Strictly Business ^

pulled a thread, and a young man twenty blocks away
looked at a wall clock, and then put on his coat.

James Turner worked in one of those little hat-cleaning
establishments on Sixth Avenue in which a fire alarm
rings when you push the door open, and where they clean
your hat while you wait — two days. James stood all
day at an electric machine that turned hats around faster
than the best brands of champagne ever could have done.
Overlooking your mild impertinence in feeling a curiosity
about the personal appearance of a stranger, I will give
you a modified description of him. Weight, 118; com-
plexion, hair and brain, light; height, five feet six; age,
about twenty- three; dressed in a $10 suit of greenish-blue
serge; pockets containing two keys and sixty- three cents
in change.

But do not misconjecture because this description sounds
like a General Alarm that James was either lost or a dead
one.

Allons!

James stood all day at his work. His feet were tender
and extremely susceptible to impositions being put upon
or below them. All day long they burned and smarted,
causing him much suffering and inconvenience. But he
was earning twelve dollars per week, which he needed to
support his feet whether his feet would support him or not.

James Turner had his own conception of what happi-
ness was, just as you and I have ours. Your delight is to

''What You Wanf 305

gad about the world in yachts and motor-cars and to hurl
ducats at wild fowl. Mine is to smoke a pipe at evenfall
and watch a badger, a rattlesnake and an owl go into their
common prairie home one by one.

James Turner's idea of bliss was different; but it was
his. He would go directly to his boarding-house when his
day's work was done. After his supper of small steak,
Bessemer potatoes, stooed (not stewed) apples and infu-
sion of chicory, he would ascend to his fifth-floor-back hall
room. Then he would take off his shoes and socks, place
the soles of his burning feet against the cold bars of his
iron bed, and read Clark Russell's sea yarns. The deli-
cious relief of the cool metal applied to his smarting soles
was his nightly joy. His favorite novels never palled upon
him ; the sea and the adventures of its navigators were his
sole intellectual passion. No millionaire was ever happier
than James Turner taking his ease.

When James left the hat-cleaning shop he walked three
blocks out of his way home to look over the goods of a
second-hand bookstall. On the sidewalk stands he had
more than once picked up a paper-covered volume of Clark
Russell at half price.

While he was bending with a scholarly stoop over the
marked-down miscellany of cast-off literature, old Tom
the caliph sauntered by. His discerning eye, made keen
by twenty years' experience in the manufacture of laundry
soap (save the wrappers!), recognized instantly the poor

306 Strictly Business

and discerning scholar, a worthy object of his caliphanous
mood. He descended the two shallow stone steps that led
from the sidewalk, and addressed without hesitation the
object of his designed munificence. His first words were
vio worse than salutatory and tentative.

James Turner looked up coldly, with " Sartor Resartus "
in one hand and " A Mad Marriage " in the other.

"Beat it," said he. "I don't want to buy any coat
hangers or town lots in Hankipoo, New Jersey. Run
along, now, and play with your Teddy bear."

** Young man," said the caliph, ignoring the flippancy
of the hat cleaner, " I observe that you are of a studious
disposition. Learning is one of the finest things in the
world. I never had any of it worth mentioning, but I
admire to see it in others. I come from the West, where
we imagine nothing but facts. Maybe I couldn't under-
stand the poetry and allusions in them books you are pick-
ing over, but I like to see somebody else seem to know what
they mean. Now, I'd like to make you a proposition.
I'm worth about $40,000,000, and I'm getting richer every
day. I made the height of it manufacturing Aunt Patty's
Silver Soap. I invented the art of making it. I experi-
mented for three years before I got just the right quantity
of chloride of sodium solution and caustic potash mixture
to curdle properly. And after I had taken some $9,000,000
out of the soap business I made the rest in corn and wheat
futures. Now, you seem to have the literary and scholarly

''What You WanV' 307

turn of character; and I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll pay
for your education at the finest college in the world. I'll
pay the expense of your rummaging over Europe and the
art galleries, and finally set you up in a good business. You
needn't make it soap if you have any objections. I see by
your clothes and frazzled necktie that you are mighty poor;
and you can't afford to turn down the offer. Well, when
do you want to begin ? "

The hat cleaner turned upon old Tom the eye of the
Big City, which is an eye expressive of cold and justifiable
suspicion, of judgment suspended as high as Haman was
hung, of self-preservation, of challenge, curiosity, defiance,
cynicism, and, strange as you may think it, of a childlike
yearning for friendliness and fellowship that must be hid-
den when one walks among the "stranger bands." For
in New Bagdad one, in order to survive, must suspect
whosoever sits, dwells, drinks, rides, walks or sleeps in
the adjacent chair, house, booth, seat, path or room.

"Say, Mike," said James Turner, "what's your line,
anyway — shoe laces .'^ I'm not buying anything. You
better put an egg in your shoe and beat it before incidents
occur to you. You can't work off any fountain pens, gold
spectacles you found on the street, or trust company cer-
tificate house clearings on me. Say, do I look like I'd
climbed down one of them missing fire-escapes at Helicon
Hall ? What's vitiating you, anyhow ? "

"Son," said the caliph, in his most Harunish tones, "as

308 Strictly Business

I said, I'm worth $40,000,000. I don't want to have it all
put in my coffin when I die. I want to do some good with
it. I seen you handling over these here volumes of liter-
ature, and I thought I'd keep you. I've give the mission-
ary societies $2,000,000, but what did I get out of it?
Nothing but a receipt from the secretary. Now, you are
just the kind of young man I'd like to take up and see what
money could make of him."

Volumes of Clark Russell were hard to find that even-
ing at the Old Book Shop. And James Turner's smarting
and aching feet did not tend to improve his temper.
Humble hat cleaner though he was, he had a spirit equal
to any caliph's.

"Say, you old faker," he said angrily, "be on your way.
I don't know what your game is, unless you want change
for a bogus $40,000,000 bill. Well, I don't carry that
much around with me. But I do carry a pretty fair left-
handed punch that you'll get if you don't move on."

"You are a blamed impudent little gutter pup," said the
caliph.

Then James delivered his self -praised punch; old Tom
seized him by the collar and kicked him thrice; the hat
cleaner rallied and clinched; two bookstands were over-
turned, and the books sent flying. A cop came up, took
an arm of each, and marched them to the nearest station
house. "Fighting and disorderly conduct," said the
cop to the sergeant.

''What You Want" 309

** Three hundred dollars bail," said the sergeant at once,
asseveratingly and inquiringly.

"Sixty-three cents," said James Turner with a harsh
laugh.

The caliph searched his pockets and collected small
bills and change amounting to four dollars.

'*I am worth," he said, "forty million dollars, but "

"Lock *em up," ordered the sergeant.

In his cell, James Turner laid himself on his cot, rumina-
ting. "Maybe he's got the money, and maybe he ain't.
But if he has or he ain't, what does he want to go 'round
butting into other folks's business for ? When a man knows
what he wants, and can get it, it's the same as $40,000,000
to him."

Then an idea came to him that brought a pleased look
to his face.

He removed his socks, drew his cot close to the door,
stretched himself out luxuriously, and placed his tortured
feet against the cold bars of the cell door. Something
hard and bulky under the blankets of his cot gave
one shoulder discomfort. He reached under, and drew
out a paper-covered volume by Clark Russell called
"A Sailor's Sweetheart." He gave a great sigh of con-
tentment.

Presently to his cell came the doorman and said :

"Say, kid, that old gazabo that was pinched with
you for scrapping seems to have been the goods after

310 Strictly Business

all. He 'phoned to his friends, and he's out at the desk
now with a roll of yellowbacks as big as a Pullman car
pillow. He wants to bail you, and for you to come out
and see him."

"Tell him I ain't in," said James Turner.

THE END

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